2009 — 25 May: Monday
Annoyingly, my connection to the Interweb malarkey has disappeared. It's 01:15 or so, and I've recently returned from a most enjoyable evening meal and film — A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. Laundry unloaded (and one black sock discovered on the floor rather than in the machine, dammit). Final cuppa of the day made, and being supped. The router has been recycled without any success so I shall just prepare this entry and then go and catch some sleep. After all, I'm retired, you know.
Did I mention it was hot? Well, it still is. OK, tonight's picture of Christa, Peter and me, taken by Big Bro back in 1982:
Gosh, we were young back then!
G'night.
With the rain...
... has come the return of the Interweb. It's 08:43 and a slightly bleary-eyed start to the day. Alas, the Irish Times opinion piece beautifully summarises an appalling "system" that should surely cause as much anguish in the Vatican as there has reportedly been in Westminster over rather more secular matters of late. I won't say words fail me, but I am struck, not for the first time, by the capability for evil self-interested behaviour by our oh-so-primitive species.
With a calm but relentless accumulation of facts, the [Mr Justice Ryan's] report blows away all the denials and obfuscations, all the moral equivocations and evasions that we have heard from some of the religious orders and their apologists. The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflicted on defenceless children — over 800 known abusers in over 200 institutions during a period of 35 years — should alone make it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic.
Most importantly, though, we owe it to all who are vulnerable in today's Irish society. For their sakes, we need to know what happens when institutions acquire absolute power over defenceless people and when the State and society come to believe that it is better to collude in crimes than to challenge cherished beliefs.
I am amazed (but certainly not amused) by the contemptible comments offered here.
I personally believe that "God" is an invention of human beings. And that although religious "systems" seem to start out as attempts to codify "good, or moral" behaviour they do all seem to end up as control systems benefitting the hierarchy involved in their seemingly-mindless administration and adherence to seemingly-bizarre rituals. I find myself wondering, if human beings didn't exist, would "God" still find it necessary to invent them?
More to read
This looks almost ridiculously entertaining. That's more time gone forever. <Sigh> By the way, what is it about the inability of our various institutions to keep sensitive data, erm, sensitively? I smiled as I read "medical details ... were contained on a lost memory stick. The data was encrypted but a note attached to the stick gave the password." Aah, that's the way to do it!
This makes grim reading, too. Do we actually get the leaders we need, or is there some immutable law that ensures the mad and/or bad rise to the top? (And thus we get the leaders we deserve!)
Much lighter
Clive James is always interesting. And usually entertaining. On sex, for example:
"You see, what you think doesn't really matter very much. What depends is what you do about it, and I had a fairly strict code of practice: look but don't touch. Heterosexual men probably die just as randy as they were when they were young — there's just less and less they can do about it. I've always thought the whole thing was funny, and tried to make humour out of it.
And I've always tried to make poetry out of it, too, because it's also sublime. Sex is ridiculous. But on the other hand," he adds, after another carefully timed pause, "it's an almost unbeatable way of reproducing the human race." Cue that drum roll again.
How did it get to be 11:01 already? The sun is coming out, it seems.
What could be simpler?
Technology, that's what. So the 320 GB PATA/SATA drive I painstakingly installed in its Akasa external enclosure a mere day ago refuses to power up, despite its wall wart getting warm. No worries. (Sigh.) Take out the drive, swap back in the IDE connector and the PATA-type power lead (as originally fitted) and replace the drive by its spare 320 GB PATA ("simple" IDE) sibling (also Hitachi). Equally unused. Equally sealed in a nice foil pack with dessicant. Made one month earlier, 15 months ago. Surprise, surprise, it also refuses to power up. No worries. (Sigh.)
Running out of spare drives hereabouts. Thinks. Aah, yes.
Break open the second1 unused Maxtor 500GB "OneTouch" drive that's been gathering dust propping open the study door and providing me with something to trip over at the top of the stairs. I'd been meaning to make this part of my latest network attached storage solution but, you know how it is, the ever-present lack of round tuits, sloth, etc. etc. No matter. Slip on the appropriate 3-pin power plug. Plug it in. Plug in its USB 2.0 cable to the iMac. There's no power switch, but a nice little light is now doing its shiny thing. OK.
(Eventually) find the Disk Utility program in the iMac's (system) applications folder, inside the utilities folder. Grudgingly concede it was a logical place to put it, Mr Spock. Select the new drive (which, by this time has long since appeared on the OS-X desktop and correctly identified itself while reporting for duty). Note that it's already an NTFS volume but — what the heck? — select Mac OS Extended [Journaled] format 'cos that's what David Pogue recommends, with italic emphasis, in "Mac OS X Leopard, the missing manual", name the new drive "MaxtorMP3s" to give me a fighting chance of remembering what it's for, click "erase"... what? finished already? Cool.
Open up the Network Magic program (having previously powered up the HP box since that's the nearest one to hand that has a complete spare set of my MP3s on it [more accurately, on its external Western Digital drive]. Besides, I use Mr HP for doing my CD ripping.2 Drag and drop the 202 (or so) gigabytes of MP3 files from Mr HP to Mr Mac. Six hours? Ho-hum. I wasn't using either machine for anything much. Just out of interest, look at the Networking performance monitor on Mr HP. Up to 90% of the (mere) 100 Mbps. Cool.
Time (12:57) for tea, and I'd better pop my intended lunch into the oven, I guess. Not only has the sun come out, things are getting distinctly warmer hereabouts. Turning into a nice day, in fact. I see that 23 GB has copied and it says five hours to go. Progress of a sort, I suppose.
Biggles, ahoy!
Stung by my (calculated) comments, Big Bro has just very kindly emailed me a further three slides from my murky past. He titled the first one "David looking pensive, Booker 1968". Well he might:
Putting my life in Bro's hands
Not a reference to a silly literary prize. No, I was looking pensive because I was about to go up in a flight from Booker airfield in the two-seater Aeronca that my brilliant aeronautical engineering apprentice (just graduated) brother had spent many evenings helping to restore to airworthiness. How pensive would you have felt, Bro, in my Hush Puppies?3 My little flight was uneventful, and I was even allowed to waggle the controls. For all I know this was what went wrong on its subsequent, and sadly final, flight.
I don't know about being a detective, but I'm certainly an amateur (at) sloth! Saint Pilling's DTP mailing list has someone asking: "Has anyone else installed Win OvPro on Linux under WINE?" To which he replied: "Around three years ago I installed Linux on a computer to tackle the issues, that was the high water mark, as far as I got." I can sympathise.
Coincidences
So much in life can be interpreted through the lens of coincidence. Last night, for example (after watching the film and some of its documentary extras — Mike and I are both very similar in some of our interests) he showed me three of the Bruce Weber-directed music videos for the Pet Shop Boys while playing the commentaries they had narrated to go with the eye candy. While I was obviously aware of this music, and recognised many of the "tunes", I was never really a great fan of music videos as a genre. I find a TV image too distracting, whereas simple background audio allows me to multi-task — just call me a shallow dilettante, I don't mind. Where's the coincidence? Well apart from my already knowing Bruce Weber's material through an entirely different route, BBC Radio 2 is now hosting a couple of hours of music introduced by the two lads who are the Pet Shop Boys. Makes a change from the Smetana I was listening to.
Poetic justice?
What an extraordinary story. Call for the green ink brigade.
It's 18:54 and the copied and relocated MP3s are slowly finding their way back into the iTunes library at the other end of the study — I hope. Time for a nibble.
Well, I suspect the meal will be nice, but I've been an idiot. I bought an "introductory offer" pack labelled "basil and lemon marinated chicken breasts" without paying much heed to that innocent little letter "s" on the end. There are four of the damn' things. I can't eat four chicken breasts. Idiot! Bother, said Pooh.
David Hare's essay is fascinating. Dare I watch the documentary on "Going Postal"? I recall the tale of a disgruntled IBM employee who (I think, back in 1982) took a shotgun back into his (North American) office with deadly consequences; indeed, I still have the newspaper clipping somewhere, though my then-manager told me not to pin it to my little patch of display space. What a curious world. Yuk.