2009 — 31 January: Saturday
So, as January prepares to bite the dust, here we are again: it will soon be time for today's last pill — and is certainly time for tonight's picture of Christa:
Christa in the Old Windsor sunlounge, 1976
I remember I'd just finished assembling the canvas and wood chair she's sitting on, and she'd just finished sewing the cushion for it — mind you, I don't remember the eventual fate of either of these items. (It was over 32 years ago, after all.) Those are her tomato plants visible in the background, and the room looks uncluttered, so I'm pretty sure this was 1976, which was an amazingly hot summer. Here and now, by contrast, it seems to be getting jolly cold this evening.
What a delicious smile! <Sigh> G'night, again after midnight. In fact, at 01:05 or so. I could wish Mark Lamarr didn't play such damn' fine music!
My own smile...
... which is more or less continuous during the News Quiz, has just broadened now that my tardy ISP has fixed the broken SSH access to my web server. (There was precisely one red blob on this page for an hour or more — the SSH status of the server that hosts my little web presence ["chamaeleon"]). It's 13:02 and still dry, but not warm.
This keeps my smile in its place, too:
[Seinfeld] was famously described by its own makers as "a show about nothing". But it wasn't really. It was a show about minutiae and neurosis and social transgression. And jokes. In fact it was a show about everything, brilliantly disguised as a show about nothing with a breezy, relaxed, sardonic style. That's why it's still such a great show, once you adjust your filter to disregard the infuriating slapped bass peppering each episode like a squelching fart cannon.
I shan't be watching the new show he goes on to describe...
Oh dear...
... in earlier years (when I could afford the train tickets) I used to take Junior along with me up to London on my usual round of bookshops. He would accompany me while Christa tended to do more of the touristy things. I even used to wear a ridiculous red and white bobble hat (or worse) to make sure Peter could easily see me in what probably seemed to a youngster like oceans of milling humanity. Apart from occasional visits to him in his Battersea flat when Christa was still able to drive, I've not been to London for a decade or so (see the insidious effect of outfits like "Amazon"?) — since he became a student, in fact.
One of my must-see places was Maxim Jakubowski's Murder One. Note the use of the past tense. The basement was an SF treasure trove1 while upstairs held the bulk of the late Donald E Westlake's oeuvre. While browsing the Wikipedia entry on Martin Van Maele I stumbled across this "Picture of the Year" competition and galleries. There are some stunning images to digest while my second pill has unfettered access to the tum ahead of a (rather late) lunch. I'm getting hungry, dammit!
The spuds and carrots are coming along nicely, the peas will be next, and the chicken breasts are on the starting block. Yum! Meanwhile, there's a cuppa to contend with. I note, with some distaste, that it's only 4C out there. Brrr! And fast approaching 14:53...
Contentedly digesting...
... my tasty meal (followed by the luxury of a single square of dark chocolate[!] and half a pink-fleshed grapefruit) to some pretty sublime musical choices on BBC Radio 3's "World Routes". I've come rather late to this programme — I've been aware of it, but Saturday afternoons with Christa were not often spent in the house. Plus, to be honest, she wasn't keen on what's very loosely called "world" music. She preferred Wagner. An acquired taste,2 if you ask me. But I am always interested to hear music from outside what you could call the Western tradition.
Later that day...
... I've just (20:36) finished dusting and re-assembling the upstairs (study) sound system in time to hear Suzi Quatro's story of putting her band all "on ass watch" to warn her if her split, and hastily gaffer-taped, leather trousers were (as it were) giving way on stage. She's quite a character.
Meanwhile, I should now be all set to record tonight's hour-long live (and orchestrally-assisted) performance of Elbow's last album. Next task, re-work the diagram as I've had to change various inputs and outputs. I also need to nip down at the half-way point to try a promising new comedy with Clive Swift at 21:30 and again at 22:00 to record the extended version of QI which I entirely overlooked yesterday. It's a jolly good job this is only a minor obsession, isn't it? And it was all sparked by the dawning realisation, on very close reading of the manual for the new Onkyo A/V receiver downstairs, that it's rather less versatile in the recording signal routing department than the venerable (but now sadly defunct) Yamaha was. But then the Yamaha did cost five times as much, eleven years ago.
And, if my late friend Colin is reading this(!) it goes without saying that neither even approaches the versatility of the switchbox I designed and you kindly built for me back in the mid-1980s. Eight audio inputs, four video inputs, two independent audio recording buses and one independent video recording bus, all beautifully packaged in a JVC metal tuner case and micro-programmed to perfection. Those were the days, heh? We spent many hours, and several bottles of Scotch, at Vanessa's kitchen table drawing up the plans, designing the user interface, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves.
Nicely put
In my opinion, of course:
If you are a parasite, for instance, natural selection may make you less complex, because you can live off the exertions of another species. Tapeworms evolved from free-living worms, and during their evolution have lost their digestive system, their nervous system, and much of their reproductive apparatus. As I tell my students, they have become just absorptive bags of gonads, much like the students themselves. Yet tapeworms are superbly adapted for a parasitic way of life.