2009 — 5 March: Thursday
I was so wrapped up1 in that marvellous 41-year-old film "2001" that I almost forgot it's well past time for tonight's picture of Christa. Another cheerful smile, and another sample from her range of red tops. I took this picture in 1975 in the High Wycombe garden on one of our weekly visits to dear Mama in the aftermath of Dad's death:
Another rotten weather forecast, too, but let's postpone judgement until after a spot of sleep. Brrr! It's cold. G'night at about 00:58 or so.
Having been cruelly ripped...
... from slumber by what sounded like a knock on the front door mere minutes ago (it's 08:50) I'm left looking at some horrid sleety stuff falling from the place where the sun should be shining. A good day for staying in, methinks. With a cuppa. Now that I've cracked my "How do I display fullscreen DVD artwork on my plasma from the Linux box?" question, "all" that remains (for example) is to finish scanning2 the other 3,000 or so bits ...
... of artwork.3 Shouldn't take more than a few millennia. Ideal cold, wet weather work. Heck, I could even wash my hair, too. And the Philip Glass music on BBC Radio 3 has just given me a great idea for equally ideal (some might say "mind-numbing") musical accompaniment. Breakfast first, however. And the sleet has almost stopped. Is it trying to tempt me out, I wonder?
I'm amused to see that the US marketing arm of Mr Bezos' little online operation reckons I should be interested in their Blu-ray football bundle (not even soccer, notice). How wrong can they be? I remain of the same opinion as the divine Nancy Banks-Smith...
Countering the weather
I often find the current edition of the "Radio Times" is open at a page a day or more earlier than the current day. Happily, I've just glanced at "today" and noted a positive wealth of potential goodness on offer. Including Antony Sher as a computer in a radio play of an Iain Banks "Culture" story and as "The Rabbi" in a three-part drama about the CIA. Crikey!
Compensating (I hope) for yesterday's minor mis-delivery, Mr Bezos has just told me that the newly re-mastered Blu-ray version of the wonderful 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice is now on its way. I last watched that in the wee small hours while periodically draining the watery fallout from Junior's leaky radiator. Happy days, heh?
The temperature...
... having shot up to 5C, and the contents of the fridge having diminished below the Plimsoll line, I think I shall soon bestir myself (as it were). Aside to Christa: interest rate cut to 0.5% and £75,000,000,000 of "new money" injected into the economy (how does that work, exactly?) — can you Adam & Eve it?
Having threaded my way carefully through the array of Chelsea Tractors in the Waitrose car park, I'm still wondering what exactly this £1250 each of "new money" is going to achieve. I've just spent a chunk of "mine" regardless. And watched as others spend considerably more. I shall make and drink a cuppa: Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget... (Looking for that noun — nepenthe — via Poe's poem led me to an interesting blog by a lady vet (she's named herself after the Latin for polar bear but, unless I register with her "Blogger" software I cannot leave an appreciative comment) in Washington, and taught me two new words, "facultative" and "fomite". I like this Interweb malarkey.) I shall put away the supplies, then boot up Antony Sher to catch up on that Iain Banks story.
Good grief
Since Christa's death I note I have changed (probably for the better) in my openness to emotions. I've just wept — briefly — at the conclusion to a short story from the Bath literary festival. I've certainly never done that before. What a strange new world it is at times.
When I was busying myself (that is, distracting myself) with CD re-ripping just before we got Christa's diagnosis, I remember noting from reading one of the CD sleeves that the original meaning of "klezmer" was "the sort of person you didn't want your daughter to marry." Likewise, I've just noted, while scanning the DVD artwork for the film The Cider House Rules, that the singer Erykah Badu made her screen début therein. Damned if I can remember it though.
A hard offer to refuse...
My young guru Brack in NZ is dangling the possibility of a mud wrestle with his sheep (called, because it's more like a hydraulic ram, "Piglet"). This would be in return for my planning his "sensible Freeview+Sky on 4 TVs installation". He's also reading up on JQuery, having found it buried within Drupal, and today sent me a delightful set of screenshots from the web manual — the authors have used a section from that lovely classic "Flatland" to illustrate the method they use for the dynamic placement and formatting of footnotes... Nine quite dense pages of markup, explanation, and coding to arrive at this conclusion:
I expect no less from the ex-head of the IBM Technical Academy.