2009 — 10 January: Saturday
It's shaping up into another brutally cold night. I was skimming the BBC advice on keeping warm (which comes, for some reason, from Humberside1) but don't think I'll be leaving the central heating on overnight. Of course, in extremis I can simply clamber into either or both a ski-suit and a well-insulated sleeping bag... Or leave a candle burning!
So to tonight's picture:
Christa and Peter in the Old Windsor front drive, late 1980
Minus 9C — brrr! At 00:25 and counting. G'night.
Hah! Recessions lead to low-wage jobs. See the National Internships Scheme for an example. It's 08:09 and minus 6C with evidence of a very hard frost. Was Lloyds TSB one of the banks that's just been pumped up with my tax money, by the way? If so, I'd like it back before they pay their £260,000,000 fine? penance? to American authorities having been "found out" as having altered records and thus allowing clients in the middle East to do business with American firms. Tsk, tsk. (And that's just the BBC Radio 2 news.)
Next pill has been popped, and I thought I might as well chase it down with a cuppa. So now I'm wide awake, unlike the rest of the estate it seems. Good morning. Brrr!
Who knew...
... a blush could be so interesting? Snippet and source:
He begins with speech, which first emerged anywhere between 40,000 and several hundred thousand years ago. Nurse Ryan's mistake would be impossible without speech. He then moves on to the habit of reporting speech and thus assigning meaning to other beings and introducing the possibility of mistaken meanings. The next step is writing, which is a mere 9,000 years old. Writing is a second-order language that captures meaning in a system of conventional signs that gradually took the form of alphabetisation from about 3,000 years ago. Alphabets mean that spellings will follow a convention and letters will be spelled out loud to indicate that convention. A given letter will have a sound distinct from the sound the letter might make in a word (think of the different way you say 't' in 'tune' and 'the'). Now we are almost there...
It's now in my Amazon basket. (I enjoyed my previous "Tallis" three years ago.) Meanwhile, avoid cities!
"Unfortunately, once you're a schadenfreude junkie, trawling life in search of a fix, you end up seeing things you can't unsee, and it was while scouring the comments section of a Daily Mail story confirming that one of our nationalised banks would still be paying huge bonuses that I stumbled on the thoughts of "Steven, London"." (Read on, at your peril...) Thank you, Marina.
Does the world need more Pooh?
Thank you, Mr (frozen-looking) Postie
(F/X: ripping cardboard)
What kind of a first name is "Mädchen"? A simple enough question, that led me somewhat astray...
Our second experience of the film [Mädchen in Uniform] was at the Goethe Institut, London, in 1978. There the public was curiously mixed: elderly women in furs, obviously German emigrants, and lesbian feminists from Hackney — we all found ourselves together this day in November.
Christa (who, I admit, had a bearskin fur inherited from her grandmother) spent quite some time in the Goethe Institut library in earlier years, usually while I hit the nearby museums.
Make no bones about it... dept.
That "QI" book of general ignorance is fascinating to dip into while warming the tootsies with a fresh cuppa (as it were).
Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for penis. This has led two scholars... to suggest that Eve was made out of Adam's penis bone rather than his rib...
Comment, as they say, would be superfluous. I've just been told, by the way, that Michelangelo's David is being returned to Italy after a two-year loan to the United States. Click the pic.
After sponsorship by various fast food joints
Thanks for that, Peter! Good afternoon.
It's 13:22, still looks jolly cold out there, and the inner man has just been satiated. Mustn't forget the next pill, with what could be called the afternoon "lemonses". I note the wireless is still a delightfully Woss-free zone. Ever onward.
Tuned (over and) out
Mains hum? What hum? Oh, you mean the loose cable? No, the Technics FM tuner has actually failed just as spectacularly as the Echostar digital satellite box did, so it really is leaving the building this time. Not bad, though, for a piece of kit I bought (from what was then called "Hampshire Audio") in late 1981. I think it cost me £140 or so (plus the £70 or so that I paid for the original roof array). And it was the only item left from the hi-fi system back then. By way of minor compensation, I've re-instated the Hi-Def Humax satellite box (for the BBC HD channel), and will now make a determined effort to tune in and customise all the BBC radio channels. The box has the advantage of a front panel display that names channels, whereas the Sony Freeview box that I've been using as a digital radio has merely a green LED to show it's on. Anyway, I have still managed to simplify the overall A/V stack.
Time (17:01) for my next cup of tea.
It looks very much as if it could soon snow outside, but the forecasts still seem to deny the possibility. It's warmed all the way back up to minus 3C last time I had a sniff of fresh air.
I must say, crockpot meals really come into their own in this foul weather. I'm just about to finish off my latest creation, some of the fat from which has solidified (in the fridge, that is) to a curious orange coloured soft paste — does the colour of a carrot run, like a vividly-coloured shirt in the wash, I wonder? Strange. But still tastes good. 18:30 and something of a race against time to get the A/V system back online in time for the next tranche of "Little Dorrit". <Sigh>
Done!