2009 — 23 May: Saturday
Well, I wonder what time Junior will show up? Not yet, of course. It's only just gone midnight. Tonight's picture of Christa is the other one I have of her up that pesky tree in the garden at the back end of 2006. Totally fearless, if you ask me:
Christa up her tree in the back garden, late 2006
The evening's video entertainment was Paul Schrader's excellent 2007 film, The Walker — a delicious Washington-set political murder mystery with a great central performance from Woody Harrelson. (Preceded, of course, by this week's dollop of HIGNFY.)
G'night. (At 01:44 — yawn.)
My new hero
Take a bow, John Wick:
"The biggest problem was knowing you had to do something but not knowing how violent the writhing of the snake was going to be. We were going to hold on to something at the end and not know
how long it was and how sharp its fangs were. But sometimes you've just got to step out."
Mr Wick added that he felt there was an injustice in how much information the government wanted to have about the public, while they wanted to keep their own affairs secret.
Well said and well done, sir. Meanwhile that charming Tory ex-barrister with his "very, very large house" — get this — claimed ministers had "mucked up the system" by introducing the Freedom of Information Act. He now says "I am sorry that in the heat of the moment I said inappropriate things1 that weren't as measured as I would have liked about the Freedom of Information Act, which I entirely support." (Source.)
The sun is shining. It's 09:31 and those sounds of the 60s are in full flow from Brian Matthew. Excellent.
Aumbry, anyone?
No, I didn't know what it was, either. If you persevere to the end of Hoggart's piece, there are a couple of gags. Almost as good as Mark Lawson's "even if it were to turn out that the paper got the documents by mugging a blind octogenarian nun, the import of the information would justify almost any way it came to light". (Source.) Hear, hear.
Here's Mr Wick in a beautifully-written piece on the Telegraph web site.
The tag-line on...
... today's DVD delivery is peculiarly appropriate:
And one of my witty readers has commented that it's a good job my IBM mole reports were easier to parse than today's first footnote. Flipping cheek, though he's right.
As I await Junior's arrival, I've just lent a heavy-duty mallet to my neighbour to help him break up some reinforced concrete more quickly (and therefore less noisily), enjoyed the dramatisation of Le Carré's first novel, and am wondering if I really want to hear the lady sword swallower ("Miss Behave") again! As a kid, I read with fascination Dan Mannix's 1951 memoir; maybe that's why I enjoyed the TV series "Carnivale" so much?
But I admit I have only skimmed through this copy I subsequently picked up in the basement of Forbidden Planet up in London in June 1992.
Isn't this just totally gorgeous?
It's just a poppy, of course. I've deliberately not used my "usual" Magic Thumb JavaScript display method this time to save on download time (my NZ family are not yet broadbanded, as it were). So, here's the thumbnail, but if you want to see a more detailed picture, just click the pic:
Where does all the Time leak?
It's 20:54 already. I was sent a link to an unofficial FAQ about the forthcoming Oppo Blu-ray disc player, reading which was a bit depressing. However, there are compensations to be found at the author's home page. Including a piece by Kenneth Grahame, Pagan Papers.