2009 — 13 May: Wednesday

Crikey, it's already well past midnight... Until a few minutes ago I've been entirely engrossed this evening in that remarkable film Black snake moan and will shortly pop back downstairs to finish watching the documentary extras. I've also had an email reminding me that it's time to pay my ex-ICL chum Ian another visit, while his house is nice and tidy — don't ask!

Meanwhile, here's tonight's picture of Christa. It dates from January 1980, just a couple of months before Peter was born. We were both starting to get quite excited¹ at the prospect of our impending parenthood.

Christa in Old Windsor, 1980

Nothing dislodged her smile, notice. Then, or in later years. G'night.

Director's commentary

In light of the extra hour or so I spent on that DVD's features I have to admit this tickled me:

Since the mistily-recalled days of twelve-inch videodiscs, director's-commentary tracks have been falsely advertised as a value-adding feature. Just as a Web site isn't considered "interactive" until it is jammed to the gills with Shockwave geegaws, a video on any species of disc is viewed as incomplete without the addition of endless yammering by a film director and, in the worst-case scenario, by practically everyone else on the crew, too.

Imagine unscripted narration delivered by a non-actor with no command of pacing or vocal inflection. The eighth circle of hell, you say? Like a buzzsaw slicing galvanized tin? No, it's actually a feature veritably demanded by geek DVD acolytes, who, like hi-fi enthusiasts of decades before, adore the technology but are not particularly interested in the art it communicates.

Joe Clark in A List Apart

Ouch!

Red Chilean grapes...

... are my pre-breakfast "snack" this morning. It's 09:25 and quite dull-looking out there. I am manfully resisting the invitation to do all the Microsoft patching that the little yellow shield has just drawn my attention to. Still, there are other chores domestical out there, too, with my name on them. If I want to continue eating, that is. And if you think it's a long time since I mentioned my crockpot, you're right. Good grief. We have over two million unemployed (according to the chap doing the chat between the music on BBC Radio 3) and 250,000 graduates will be swelling that number later this summer. What a pickle.

I continue to do my bit for the retail economy. I ordered the film Hustle and Flow a few hours ago purely on the strength of that moaning Black Snake (the title of a Blues song — almost — last night). The director claims to be working his way through five distinct styles of music. "Hustle" is "rap", I gather. Not my forte usually.

I also ordered the biography of Virginia Cherrill ("Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill") by Miranda Seymour on the strength of an item on yesterday's "Woman's Hour" before I was called away to Ferndown. I finished Chris Mullin's diaries just in time to hear the lad himself in a back-bench sound-bite a day or so ago. I worked steadily through them a few dozen pages at a time as my bedtime reading. It's odd reading a political diary of such candour just a few years after the events. Close enough, certainly, for quite a few of the key players² still to be knocking around, screwing things up, bitching and back-stabbing, (and, indeed, to be racking up some of their expenses spending, no doubt).

Success downunder:

Last week I finally found an appropriate round tuit and sent Big Bro the long-overdue set of NZ stamps that dear Mama collects for him. I'd wrapped them around a funny card from the Sam Miller motorbike museum's gifte shoppe and thrown in a mint set of Brunel stamps that Christa bought for me back in early 2006... He's just emailed me to say Your engineered envelope arrived today for which many thanks! A nice set of Brunel stamps and much appreciated. The card was funny³ also!

I'm now feeling a glow of brotherly virtue. Must be time for breakfast. And just one⁴ lousy little "Malicious software removal tool" update. Makes a change. Didn't even have to reboot. But now it's drizzling in the "stay out and it will soak you" kind of way. I can almost hear the weeds slurping.

Cool! IE8 (for the first time ever) shows the top bar of my web site along the top of the browser window — just like every other browser already did. About time too! CSS rules... But where have they hidden the "refresh" button this time? (Found it.) Since I only use IE for security patching, that will do for now.

Not to be out-done, the iMac is now busily wrapping its little head around a 287MB update to the entire damn' Leopard operating system. And to think we used to worry about the size of the IBM Java download footprint creeping up past the 4MB limit. On that front, by the way, here's an amusing magazine front page. Click the pic to help you spot the Mounce:

An official IBM strategist? Moi?

I tried to like "How to lose friends and alienate people" — after all, it's one of my talents. I bought the book back in November 2001. Here, Mr Young transcribes an interview with Charlie Kaufman, director of Synecdoche, New York. "Synecdoche" (which I heard pronounced on BBC Radio 3 only yesterday, for the first time ever — it apparently has four syllables) remains on my to-be-watched-soon list. It drizzles on (at 11:44) but I think I can cope. The OSX upgrade seems OK, too.

Partial success in Eastleigh:

My lazy loafing around this morning meant I arrived in Sainsbury's after the departure of my well-fired loaves. No matter, I did get The Word and — lest any further proof be needed that I'm fast approaching at least the lower slopes of Mount Middle-aged — a bargain book and 4xCD set of Pam Ayres (all for less than £15 rather than the £20 I was expecting). Lidl was slightly more fruit(loaf)ful. Plus (of course) Waitrose has supplied the next batch of crockpottery magic (though I forgot the Bramley and will have to improvise with a sour Granny Smith). Result.

I shall now ruminate as I digest my chicken curry lunch. It's still dull outside, but not cold and no longer drizzling either. Mind you, young Iggy looks as if he could do with a tad of rehydration:

Perhaps he could have a word with young Pam?

Oh dear. My webserver seems to be webservering away, but my email keeps reporting "temporary login failure". I thought it had gone a bit quiet round here. (I have another life, of sorts, on Google mail if for some arcane reason you need to contact me.) davidDOTmounce AT googlemailDOTcom should do the trick. Never mind; soon be teatime.

Right. Time to listen to an examination of the legalities of death, hosted by Clive Anderson, if you please.

Footnotes

¹  In my case, alas, the excitement manifested itself as an attack of shingles, neatly coinciding with an infection trapped under a tooth filling. Boy, that was a fun weekend until GP and dental surgeries opened on a Monday morning... I can still remember the book on world politics that I was reading in a desperate attempt to distract myself in the wee small hours. (It was Jeremy Murray-Brown's turgid tome Portraits of power: 20th Century shapers.) Back in those primitive times, the NHS state-of-the-ark treatment for shingles consisted of a ghastly liquid that you got Christa to paint onto the torso blisters you couldn't reach, mysteriously rendering them even more painful. Bring back leeches, I say!
²  Ben Elton did a nice rant, many years ago, about the Sun journalist you'd uncover in the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno. I think we can safely add a few MPs to that circle. ("They'd none of them be missed.")
³  It showed a couple of leather flying jacket-clad RAF "types" walking back, both bare-assed with twigs etc stuck in their now-exposed nether regions. The instructor was mildly suggesting to the cadet that perhaps the final approach had been a bit too low over the trees at the edge of the landing field.
⁴  In stark contrast, my "sacrificial" XP machine has found 50.3 MB of stuff (mind you, that includes IE8 — only Microsoft would have the gall to describe their web browser as a high-priority update, surely?) And (just because I downloaded their PowerPoint viewer [and I only did that to get hold of some of their nice fonts]) another service pack and security "fixes" for stuff I never use. Microsoft Orifice? Who needs that? I've learned the hard way, however, that simple uninstallation is rarely the wise option. That's why I call this one the "sacrificial" machine... Fingers crossed, while I restart it.