2009 — 19 May: Tuesday
For some reason, doubtless related to my great age, I had somehow managed to convince myself that this was Junior's birthday. Indeed, I went so far as to send him an email asking what he fancied before I realised my (potentially expensive!) mistake. Why doesn't Thunderbird let me recall such emails, I wonder? Lotus Notes could do it years ago.
Oh well. Tonight's picture of Christa is another blast from the happy past. I took it during our Guernsey holiday in 1977:
Christa on the rocks in Guernsey, 1977
G'night.
Rejoice in the Lamb?
No, not my current crockpot (though it's pretty tasty). Benjamin Britten's "Rejoice in the Lamb" seems to me to share its two-note background chord structure (at the start) with one of the themes from that terrifying 1979 horror film Alien!1 Thank you, Sara Mohr-Pietsch (though she unaccountably failed to warn me of this nugget). It's 08:27 and sleep basically fled when Mr Council made his noisy reconnoitre before coming round again to actually empty the recycle bins.
By the way, here's the wordy stuff from yesterday's afternoon expedition:
- Clips from a Life, by Denis Norden
"I was only once faced with the task of auditioning a nimiety of sopranos" - When you are engulfed in flames, by David Sedaris
Did you know Donna Summer can really put the fear of God into a chaffinch? - Up till now, by William Shatner
The inside track on Denny Crane's thought processes, and much more besides - How fiction works, by James Wood
I obviously read differently from this New Yorker staff writer, and Professor of the Practice of Literary2 Criticism at Harvard!
Meanwhile, Quentin Letts is asking "What's the point of Formula One?" Good question. Utterly pointless. And I say that even though now, after many years, I'm finally a driver. Unlike Adolf Hitler.
Asides to Christa
I'm back from topping up your mother-in-law's account with precisely 25% of her late sister's worldly goods. You'd be distressed to note how many of the little businesses in the "Central Precinct" appear to be pointing their toes to the sky. And dismayed to learn that your friend Mary no longer recognises me — she's looking rather frail, I must say.
I've arranged a minor-league afternoon tea adventure for the, erm, afternoon. Rain or shine. (Mild intermittent drizzle, currently.) I'm also hoping for a walk tomorrow, subject to the fickle feather warcast.
Latest batch of pixels
Mr Postie dropped three of these off yesterday; I picked up the other in town:
Buying decisions?
- Terminator: the Sarah Connor chronicles
I live in hope that this series (based soon after the events of "Terminator 2" rather than the ghastly "Terminator 3") will be OK. It was a tenner - The Waiting Room
Found this on the Borders bargain shelves. Looks promising (and I'm a terrible Romantic) - Southland Tales
The new film from the chap who made "Donnie Darko" — should be interesting (if maddening) - Hustle & Flow
I ordered this within minutes of finishing the director's second film ("Black snake moan")
Just listening to some recordings of Borges — amazing writer.
This is a depressing list. Monitus es.
Right! Time to trot — it's 14:21 — tick tock.
Nicely put
Source and snippet:
The parliament of ostriches still doesn't get it. Anyone watching today would [have] been flummoxed by the Byzantine procedural folderol that prevented a debate on the speaker's future, as they gazed at the weird black rosette on his back. How many realised that the Tory grandee's coded reference to "The Norway debate" meant "In the name of God go!". And how many cared?
The 6 o'clock national radio news on the BBC has just described MPs as having indulged in "Spanish practices" — can we expect the Spanish Inquisition?
BookMooching
I've just corrected a broken hypertext link3 into an elderly Guardian article by David McKie (about his obsession — shared, it seems, by several of us) that I'd noted two years ago. Having pinpointed the correct current location of their page I reminded myself of some of the comments it had attracted from the fellow obsessives, and thus have now found BookMooch.
Meanwhile (to my delight) "Desmo" Carrington has just played the Ballad of Bethnal Green (Paddy Roberts). Excellent! Though he did follow it with some Russ Conway, and has now moved on to Queen's4 Bohemian Rhapsody. 2,176,000 copies sold in the UK alone... (Desmo's on an Ivor Novello award winners special, it seems.)
I missed our new Poet Laureate's little potshot:
What did we do with the trust of your vote? Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.
Hope Douglas Hogg enjoys that one, as he re-pays the £2,200 bill for clearing the moat at his country pad. I loved his peculiar logic: he didn't claim for the moat-job, but it featured on a list of costs submitted with his parliamentary expenses. Clear as mud, if you ask me. But I didn't vote for him, or his party come to that.
Later
Just (22:46) finished watching one of yesterday's acquisitions — The Waiting Room — and I can highly recommend it. Although I haven't seen "Sex and the City" I suspect Mark Kermode's front cover blurb is a massive understatement...
Nor was I previously aware of writer/director Roger Goldby, but I shall now keep an eye out for more of his work. He can be very proud of this simple little low-budget gem.