2009 — 6 April: Monday

Tonight's picture is suitable for a game of "spot the as-yet unplanted Japanese cherry tree" nearly a quarter of a century ago. The small blue inflatable paddling pool more or less marks the spot:

Garden

I remember passing the climbing frame along to David Reynolds (for his son Tom, of course!) after Peter had outgrown it. Marvellous garden toys, by the way. Though I suppose these days they would never pass a health and safety audit. (Not that we evolved from tree-dwelling shrew-like creatures, of course.)

G'night.

Duller start

But not the rain that the BBC had been promising (so far). It's 08:10 and the morning news is as dreary as ever. An Italian earthquake. A new Euro directive (in response to the London bombings of July 2005?!) that's just chiseled yet further away at our online privacy. (If only I trusted those "in authority" and could believe that they were other than inept, and had no motives other than the purest...) And poor old Posties are being asked to pick up their red rubber bands (where am I going to get my supplies now?)

A neat summary of what I think about economists:

[They] are masters in the science of prediction, but as a group, if not to a man, they failed to predict a crisis that has wiped out nearly half the wealth invested in the stock market and elsewhere (measured of course from the peak). The economists did no better than their unscientific rivals, the stock pickers, who are in the business of prediction... We are not so surprised by the delusions of crowds and mobs — who does not know they are unreliable? —but that their delusions should be supported and promoted by scientists of the rank and caliber of economists might easily shake our confidence in the reliability of our elites and even of our scientific civilization.

Harvey Mansfield in The Weekly Standard


You think? Do we even have a scientific civilisation? (The Guardian interview with Yvette Cooper1 sheds an alternative light.) I definitely need some breakfast!

StreetLaughter

I keep this chap's blog on my Bookmarks Toolbar. It's witty, insightful, and an almost guaranteed spirit raiser. (Besides he told me in an email of the existence of the National Lampoon DVD-ROM that enabled me to track down all the lovely work by Shary Flenniken in that disreputable organ.) Here's his "take" on one of the funniest features of that miraculous film The Producers.

Thanks, Mr Postie:

Stuff

That's the CD cover of a two-CD set, but I've also got the matching DVD (which, interestingly, is both NTSC and Region 0, but carries a UK "censorship" classification mark). And the long-awaited DVD of the Elliott Gould movie I mentioned a year ago (based on a lovely Ken Kolb novel). I note Sphere couldn't spell his first name.

Later

I've fed and watered my lunchtime visitor (though I was a little sorry he didn't pedal over on his new electric toy as I'd been hoping for a "go" on it). He declared himself satisfied with the quality of my own new electric toys, having tried some favourite Bach and Mendelssohn on the video and audio parts respectively. It's now 15:06 and I'm wondering whether to nip out to the shops ahead of the weather, as it were.

Bits of string too short to keep... dept.

As I've mentioned, I used to share my life with Christa, who was a delightful domestic squirrel. Well, following some pointed mutterings from my recent visitor about "clutter" and (following a brief tour of la Maison Mounce) the assertion that "I'm glad I've seen this because now I realise my house is tidy" etc. etc. I've actually been tackling the worst of the accumulated tangles of electric string of various sorts, shapes and sizes that have, as it were, built up in the wake of a wholesale re-arrangement of my upstairs and downstairs viewing and listening systems. Thank you, Bob!

I started just by removing it all from Junior's room, which at least reveals he does still have a carpet in there. It seems to me that I have no further use for any SCART leads, S-Video leads, BNC video cables, very little use for further analogue audio cables, no use whatsoever for a SCART/sync separator, no forseeable use for further optical digital leads beyond my present set, no use whatsoever for any further FM or UHF aerial co-ax leads, no use whatsoever for the three sets of component video leads, no forseeable need for the PC analogue RGB leads, or the three or four DVI-D leads, or the random scraps of mains cable.2

Next time I look up, it's 18:09 and I seem to be getting hungry again. "Bother!" said Pooh.

Then, it's 20:15 and Brian has just left, clutching a SCART and a spare. Seren-bloody-dipity, if you ask me. And after Cathy kindly sent me a photo of the correct wall-wart to power my Roku Soundbridge network music player, I've finally found where it's been hiding. I must have a use for that somewhere... All this to the glorious accompaniment of Stravinsky's "Firebird", of course. Lovely-jubbly. Must be time for the next cuppa. And to catch some of that wonderful old rogue "Dr Syn" written by Sybil Thorndike's brother, Russell.

  

Footnotes

1  Nearly 10 years ago, Chris Mullin described her in his diary entry of 11th November 1999: "bright and pleasant, but a swot rather than a natural talent. Lacks the magic to reach the top but she will get close."
2  And I never did have any use for the lousy quality audio and composite video leads that invariably fall out of the packaging of any and every new item of kit. The last time I can recall composite video being touted as an improvement on anything was back in the very early 1980s when modulated RF was used to route combined audio and video from the primitive VCRs then in use to the aerial socket on the back of the "telly".