2009 — 21 May: Thursday
Tonight's picture of Christa shows her in the front garden on 8th October 2007. Pain had been banished by the radiation that had finished a week earlier and, as she said herself in emails to several people, she felt as if she'd just emerged from the abyss:
Christa in the front garden, October 2007
Alas for such a damnably short what, reprieve? stay of execution? respite? I'm no better able to find the right word now than I was 19 months ago. But frankly all that mattered was that she was no longer in pain for a while... I'd promised her that, and at least I managed to keep that promise. Though if she could see the splendid crop of weeds now thriving there, she'd certainly give me a pained look. <Sigh>
Good films
I'm delighted to say that The Visitor did indeed take the score up to four good films in a row. It was made by Thomas McCarthy who'd earlier delighted the pair of us with The Station Agent. Check them both out!
Time (01:09) for some sleep no matter how enticing the "extras" interview with the director is. G'night.
And, at...
... 10:29, having given the crockpot a good stuffing, I can put my feet up(!) with the zapped cuppa and listen as what sounds very like a chuffa whizzes past. I'm sure my appetite for breakfast will return in time for the BBC Radio 4 examination of Tommy. (Gotta love that "culutral [sic] and musical value".) When the Ken Russell 1975 soundtrack of his film variant initially came out on vinyl, by the way, it had an unannounced (and presumably unintentional) bonus: a matrix quadrophonic sound mix. I know, because as part of my then hi-fi kit reviewing duties I'd been commissioned to do an article on the main contending systems and the living room was a cornucopia of quad sound decoders. (If that's the correct collective noun.)
The earlier sunshine is now giving way to quite a few clouds, so the forecast got that bit right.
My ignorance...
... of the dismal science of economics is legendary. I was unaware, until three minutes ago, of the existence, let alone the meaning, of sovereign wealth fund, SWF, (other than as a Flash movie file format):
One of the basic reasons for the tendency to overvalue SWFs has to be that virtually none of these funds are meaningfully transparent (the major exception being Norway's Government Pension Fund, which is democratically beholden to fully disclose its assets). But a lack of transparency alone doesn't really explain why people would tend to imagine SWFs as having multiple times their actual value. So what does? Pending further analysis, let's consider the boogeyman factor — the possibility that these overvaluations were plausible to us mainly because of our (not entirely unreasonable) discomfort with large, murky sums of money being invested in our economies by super-rich states that aren't what you'd call aligned with us geopolitically.
It's nice to return...
... to a house in which there's a pleasing smell from the crockpot department. This is after a minor-league expotition for afternoon tea at Hillier's and the adventure of the part-time traffic lights in Hursley at which I wanted to turn right, thus retracing the route of my very first ever drive in the car over 14,500 miles ago.
Today's amusements (so far) have included the MP resigning over the expenses claimed for a floating duck island and the MP resigning over the expenses claimed for his "very large house" that he thinks "people are jealous of". How many more to come, I wonder? Good job they all say they have done nothing wrong and broken no rules. (Hang on! They make the rules. So how come they feel the need to resign? Could it possibly be a long-unexercised sense of shame? No, I didn't think so either.)
I think I share some of my genes with Rossini's thieving magpie (or do I mean the jackdaw of Rheims?) That's to say, I like bright, shiny, colourful things like this...
... essentially meaningless graph. I mean, didn't the "credit rating agency" at the heart of this "news story" assure us, not so long ago, that all those banks and financial institutions that have subsequently imploded (and, now that they are worthless, have mysteriously fallen into my ownership as an impoverished tax payer) were safe, solid, and reliable? Dismal "science" indeed.
Crikey!
If you'd asked me five minutes ago if I had any films in my collection written (or even co-written) by that lovely chap Shel Silverstein, I'd have said "Don't be silly! He wrote hilarious satirical verses (often for "Playboy" magazine) and kids' stuff but not screenplays, surely?" Well, that shows you how little I know. I've just scanned the cover artwork of David Mamet's second film as a director: the 1988 mob comedy Things Change — guess who co-wrote the screenplay? In fact, looking Shel up on IMDB, I now learn he wrote "The ballad of Lucy Jordan". (I thought Marianne Faithfull had done so.) I remain in awe of my ignorance.