2009 — 8 February: Sunday
Hard frost tonight, apparently. (Certainly this morning the study skylight was glued shut by solid water.) Well, here's tonight's frost-dispelling picture of Christa:
Christa's German "gang" of chums over here will know more about this event than I do! Right, just about time to nip down and stop the recording of the Woody Allen film I do not know ("Scoop"). And if you're reading this, Big Bro, your ISP again bounced my email, so I've resorted to using Google mail to send you back the Mustang picture. I suspect you will be able to extract it for yourself in future — just read my pellucid instructions!
G'night.
Browned off...
Here I am, gas men digging up stuff like crazy just across the road, promised frost and foul weather displaced by strangely unfamiliar sunshine (heck, I may even be able to hang the laundry up outside at this rate), beginnings of a snuffly cold, endings of a sore finger (I hope!), and a couple of emails from Big Bro, one wondering what's happened to the envelope full of stamps1 I picked up from dear Mama and the other showing me (after I've rotated it through 180 degrees of course) what the NZ mob is up to:
Compare and contrast this 1987 variant!
What a difference a word makes... dept.
Just a slip of the tongue, I'm (almost) certain:
Mark Stobbs: We broadly agree with everything that the Bar Council has said on that. We think that it is unfortunate that the Government have not implemented the full
recommendations of the Law Commission, which provided, we thought, a very elegant way of avoiding the problems that a mandatory death sentence causes and that
the existing —
Q 273 Mr. Garnier: Do you mean mandatory life sentence?
Mark Stobbs: Yes, mandatory life sentence, I apologise.
Mr Stobbs is Director of Legal Policy, Law Society. Mr Garnier is the Tory MP for Harborough. I was actually looking for the discussion of Clause 152 but was arrested (as it were) by this earlier exchange. Why my interest in a clause buried within the Coroners and Justice bill? Good question. It's an amendment to the Data Protection Act and, according to these fine folk, "It would allow ministers to make 'Information Sharing Orders', that can alter any Act of Parliament and cancel all rules of confidentiality in order to use information obtained for one purpose to be used for another."
Nice.
That afternoon...
Being a gentleman of leisure, I breakfasted quite late. Hung up the laundry. Then nipped out on the supplies trail just a little ahead of a few spots of rain. So I can now turn my attention to unloading the PVRs (including some material Brian will appreciate as his Humax hung a fortnight before his return from Patagonia, so they missed some of the John Mortimer and Maureen Lipman items). Then I suppose I'd better think about lunch — I still don't have the word for the mid-afternoon equivalent of "brunch"... "lea" lacks a certain something. Quite how it can already be 14:37 passeth my understanding.
Some while ago I tried a meal of mini chicken breast fillets with a Moroccan apricot and almond sauce. The sauce also contained yoghurt. Since I'm still alive I have just risked a repeat performance. Yum! Meanwhile (body taken care of, as it were) I'm left pondering the philosophical puzzler: why would any sentient being wish to commission2 a TV programme about Paris Hilton auditioning people to be her next UK best friend?
I've been dipping into the New Statesman archive of stuff by Sean French (again):
Browsing through [the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations] made me wonder if some virus had swept through the modern world, depriving almost all humans of the ability to formulate a decent epigram. W B Yeats wrote that he always felt affection for Oscar Wilde after hearing him say of George Bernard Shaw that he had no enemies but was disliked by all his friends.
It's almost exactly two years since I discovered the "xkcd" web comic. I liked this riff on "Goldfinger"...
