2009 — 20 April: Monday
For my 900th diary entry (give or take) and my next picture of Christa, come with me back to 1975, in the garden at High Wycombe again:
It's 00:29 and — after writing to Val over in Stockholm — I've just topped up the blood sugar with a bit of suppertime drinking chocolate that was left over from Christa's request for it a couple of weeks before her final hospitalisation. And Bob Dylan's current "Theme Time Radio Hour" is all about sugar — thank you, Mr Koestler.
Oh well, g'night.
One lives and learns
Today's lesson, kiddies, is don't drink a large mug of chocolate after midnight and expect to have an uninterrupted night's sleep. Two separate fluid escape attempts kept me, as it were, on my toes, while the sound of breaking glass (a glancing reference to a Rupert Hine production, unless memory fails me) as the local authority gathered up this month's alcohol containers from my neighbour's black plastic crates helped ensure the further flight from my desired state of unconsciousness. And I've already been called a pedant today, too!
But I was tickled to note in a blog comment this morning that English is a wonderful language. In romanian... we have the same word for faith and belief: "credinta", from the latin "credo". Which is retarded. Romanians don't have many words for ideas that express reason in action. We don't have a word for "fallacy" and the word for "[logical] consistency" is used in cooking. (Source.) That blog has a wealth of good stuff in it, by the way.
Where's that cuppa? It's already 10:07 — this won't do, will it? Nor will listening to some silly lady who admits to heavy drinking while pregnant. Back to Radio 3 for me.
Frank Drake
"Contact!" yelled Biggles. (A clear reference to a recently re-watched film, of course. No, not Biggles.)
The image comes from the reliably wonderful xkcd webcomic. I was led to it, however, by this quotation on the BBC web site:
While researchers often come up with overall estimates of the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe, it is a process fraught with guesswork; recent guesses put the number anywhere between a million and less than one.
Gotta love that "less than one". It had been picked up by Terry's Dave Semeniuk. Cool. Now, about breakfast...
The half-forgotten joys...
... of low-level DTP markup editing. In this case, to force a new page after each "head 2":
Another idea would be a form of DIY markup, for example after each heading put the word "wibble" in 0.1pt transparent text. Then play at search/replace "wibble" with "wibble{newpage}".
Crikey! The sun shines on, and it will soon be time to stuff the inner man yet again. It's 12:46 and there's been some delicious Elgar as an aural backdrop to my pottering.
Astonishment knows no bounds... dept.
As my little pie's molecules are set spinning ever faster (must remember to take the thing out of the oven at the top of the hour) I must just ask, Christa, if you can believe how it can possibly be 35 years since we used to enjoy watching this American import?
Though, come to think of it, the UK probably didn't get it until a year or so later.
Yum! That's better. Now then... oh, yes, I was quite tickled by the last headline here until I realised el Paxo intends to die first:
So Oracle is to buy Sun. Hmmm.
Pop Balla(r)ds?
An interesting article.
And I've just heard Radcliffe and Maconie catching up with Sarah Outen (again) as she rows across the Indian Ocean. One cool youngster.
Right! It's 22:02 and I've done more than enough scanning for one day. I'm off downstairs to see if the telly still works.