2009 — 1 June: Monday, and rabbits!
As I mentioned a mere 150 days or so into this retirement skylark, we still had number #1 niece with us after Big Bro had flown the coop, so before we decanted her on to a London-bound train we'd taken her over to (and of course up) the Spinnaker Tower for a look-see. Happily, visibility was excellent on that day, though the blue-green tinge of the glass was a bit of a nuisance.
Tonight's photo of Christa,1 taken on one of the observation platforms, is one of the (very) rare ones where she's not actually smiling 'cos she was concentrating on something, and thus had momentarily forgotten I was lurking there with my (then brand-new) Canon camera:
She may have been six years older than me, but she still had very little grey hair compared to me both then, and since! G'night.
Yeasty goodness
Love a good news story? Is this one? Call in the Quackometer. Wait, no, that's only for medical nonsense... Catch up with the Onion and have a cuppa instead, David. It's 09:09 and sunny again.
Speaking of mystical faces (or was that "faeces"?) I suspect you have to love a paragraph that begins: "The face of UFO abductology changed dramatically with the 1981 publication of Budd Hopkins's Missing Time". Or, maybe, not. (Source.)
Still there
The sea at Bournemouth, that is. Well, it was when I left at about 13:15 — it may all have evaporated by now. It's warm enough. Swung efficiently by the foody shop on the way home, too. But only junk from Mr Postie. (I did rather better at the seaside.)
When Rob Cowan played the music by Bernard Herrmann from Hitchcock's North by Northwest (easily my favourite Hitchcock film) I'm (almost) sure he said it was released 50 years ago to the day. And they spell his name two different ways. IMDB only seems to have the UK release date, even on its US site. The "trivia" section gives July 1959. I shall lie awake all night worrying!
Particularly having just stumbled across the hole-digging map by Wendy (once Walter) Carlos. And her amazing tales of surround sound. There can't be too many artists with the integrity to persuade their record company to withdraw an album of theirs from sale because of a botched quad-matrix sound mix, surely? And this device (used by Kubrick to deal with HAL's dying voice) is damned cool, too.
I've been rambling around here, having taken the long way round starting from the latest, and ever-reliable, Ansible. And travelling via a place I haven't been for quite a while: Torque Control. (I even thought for a minute I could see where Junior had got his own blog template from, too! I was wrong, needless to say.)
In the summer of 1987 I discovered, and romped delightedly through, three novels by the author Tim Powers. Who remembers "The drawing of the dark", "The Anubis Gates", and "Dinner at Deviant's Palace" I wonder? Well, China Miéville for one. You can find an appreciative essay on the time travel central to "Anubis Gates" in the middle of this PDF sample file.
Much later
The film In Bruges is excellent. And it's taken me less than two months to get to it. Not bad! Christa would have liked it for the sight-seeing aspects, too. We drove on the A10 through Belgium to Brussels on numerous trips to and from Meisenheim in the 1970s and the early 1980s. It was always fun taking that midnight ferry from Dover to Ostend. But we never diverted the few kilometres north to "Brugge". Our route was usually Ostend, Brussels, Namur, Luxembourg, Trier, Baumholder, Meisenheim. (With a snack stop at a particular coffee house Christa liked in Luxembourg.) The last few kilometres were always tricky because it was a long trip and the end of a long day. And the fact that the local name for the Meisenheim area translates as "beyond the back of the moon" gives some flavour of its remoteness, at least until a few more motorways were built in the 1980s.
How would I ever have found Christa had she not come to England?! Amazing.