2009 — 5 February: Thursday
Another picture of Christa (and Peter!), with rather better colour balance than my previous effort:
Christa in Old Windsor, early in 1980
There is, as they say, a first time for everything. Tonight's first time was my first motorway in snow and sleet. I'm recently back from that meal and a movie ("Into the Wild" — very highly recommended) with Mike and Bryan, but first had to clear an inch of snow off the windscreen etc before I set off. My only skid was back on my own driveway, lining up on the garage "gap", but I think I shall keep the Yaris indoors, as it were, for the rest of the day unless it warms up considerabubble. It's 01:33 and the porch thermometer was showing minus 1C about twenty minutes ago. My final cuppa is now warming me up nicely.
Bad rep
I've just discovered another incentive to find myself a different ISP, dammit. I just tried to email Big Bro and got the following "bounce" message:
SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
host zuul.ihug.co.nz [203.109.135.49]: 554-mx.mailfilter4.ihug.co.nz
554 BLOCKED: The SenderBase reputation of your ISP or corporate mail server is extremely bad.
What a dreadful calumny! Sorry about that Bro, but it seems the bad guys have managed to infiltrate my Texan mail server to a sufficient extent to get it blacklisted. If you see this, Junior, you may care to raise a problem ticket with them... That's the last straw for tonight. G'night.
Golliwog toys have been withdrawn from Brenda's shop on her Sandringham estate, having been on sale there for the last year. My word! It just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?
I've had another email bounced too. Sorry Len! Time (10:05) for my breakfast cuppa. The temperature's crawled all the way up to plus 1C and most of the standing snow / ice is disappearing. Horrid stuff.
Plus ça change?
"There's not a lot of collective memory that goes back to the early 1980s" says a youngster on BBC Radio 4 trying to explain why local authorities, which used to provide 16% of UK mortgages, got out of that business. (Can anyone say "Thatcher"?) They now wish to get back in to "unfreeze" the housing market by loading risk on to council tax payers. So that's my income tax and my council tax spent for generations to come. Meanwhile Messrs Black Bin have just shown up, two days late.
Interest rates now at 1% (can you believe that, Christa?) You hafta laugh. I wonder vaguely when they're going to start charging me money to keep my pittance in the bank. Plus, what can best be described as a silly young bint (did I spell that correctly?) is demanding the use of "quantitative easing" aka printing more money (literally) as if that is a solution to this dismal crisis. I don't think I can take any more of BBC Radio 4 for, perhaps, the next decade.
Meanwhile, there's so much snow around that my traffic map has been disabled (due to high demand)... "we are sorry for the inconvenience". Pah!
I can't even read their small print!
GOM... dept.
Nor can I take safe refuge with BBC Radio 2. Not if Steve Wright can use "prodigious" when he means "prestigious". I know I'm a grumpy old man, but there are limits. So I've now put on Elbow's "The seldom seen kid"1 which Mr Postie staggered up the drive with, inter alia, a couple of hours ago.
Further insight (of sorts) into my purchasing decisions:
- The Good Shepherd
Ever since discovering the delightful book "The defection of AJ Lewinter" by Robert Littell back in 1974, I've been an easy target for material giving (or purporting to give) insight(s) into the murky world of the CIA - Snow White
Sigourney Weaver as the wicked witch? What's not to like? Besides it will (I hope) contrast nicely with my Disney cartoon version - The Illusionist
Having very much enjoyed "The Prestige" almost exactly a year ago, I thought I'd give this "rival" title a chance
I also get to vote on whether Chandler's Ford and Hiltingbury should be one parish council or two. I bet Christa could easily predict which way Hiltingbury would vote! Well, the afternoon cuppa may help me decide. It's 15:05 and the ice has nearly all gone. And now it's 18:29 and the snow forecast sounds ever more horrid. Brrr!
It's 23:51 and I've just crossed a pair of DVDs off my "to be watched" pile: "Burn before reading" and "War, Inc." The former (Coen brothers) was a great deal funnier though the latter (John Cusack wrote and produced, as well as starred in it) tried very hard. You can't force comedy, and if your anti-war, anti-Western satire is too realistic, well, it just doesn't always work. I was reminded primarily of Deal of the century at times. I thought that (1983!) film was pretty good, but it's fair to say the viewing public stayed away in droves.