2009 — 16 June: Tuesday

"My friend is gone, my hair is grey, and I ache in the places where I used to play"... Good ol' Leonard Cohen! It's 01:52 or so and — having watched Twilight (the Stephenie Meyer vampire story,1 not the excellent Robert Benton / Richard Russo movie of the same name) and all the extras on the second disc (another two hours) — I'm tired.

So, yawn, it's time for a suitably bedtime photo of Christa, Peter, and a long-gone comfort blanket:

Christa and Peter

Like me, Peter hated to go to bed until he was ready to crash. Then, once asleep, would remain so through anything short of a plane crash. So (for example) at age 3 he would as often as not toddle downstairs to join me as I watched the late-night episodes of Hill Street Blues, falling asleep on me, basically. At other times, he'd "need" a late-night biscuit and one last story. So Christa or I would do the honours. We always tried to treat him as a small but equal adult rather than as a child. While I don't think the end result is in any way a disappointment, I guess the David & Christa patented approach to child-rearing2 wouldn't be universally applicable.

G'night.

Sunshine beckons

It's quite handy having a skylight. I've just used it to exchange greetings with my Koran fan without the bother of getting dressed first. Mind you, he did notice I was still jammed into my jims. No flies on him despite his proximity to his little brown food recycling bin. Time (09:54) for chai, methinks. (Or "shay" as Park Yunnie spells it.)

Blast! There's a new edition of "Warriors on wheels" out with some freshly-added material. Including an afterword by Ben Owen, I think. I may yet be able to replace the copy I nicked from Big Bro... And a new Rushkoff, too.

I wonder when the "Great firewall of China" will start to, as it were, pop up over here? After all, the ludicrous idea that our overlords know better than we what we ought to do, see, and (probably) think is a perennially recurring one. It seems China wants to make all new PCs PC. You have to be in awe of the depth of technical understanding demonstrated by the sentence: "China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has ordered the problem be fixed." Just like that, heh? I suppose it's almost identical to the understanding that has led to so many UK guvmint costly I.T. fiascos. I.T. may not be rocket science,3 but that doesn't mean it's easy.

Mortal thoughts

Last night's vampires may be (un)dead but Christa — undeniably not (un)dead — remains a large part of my life. I'm sure this process of grieving and rebuilding varies from person to person and I'm sure the time taken to "recover" (whatever that means!) is equally variable. If it were anyone else but Christa, it would be quite fascinating to observe. But I don't have a clue how "normal" or otherwise my feelings are; heck, I'm not even sure I know what those feelings are. I just know they are what they are as the days go bumping gently past.

One of my two and a half remaining aunts4 sent me a kindly email to see how I was doing. Here's part of my reply:

Yep, I'm still here, still putting one foot in front of the other, still breathing, still pottering along, still vaguely wondering what hit me. Still waiting for it to stop hurting so much, which it is doing slowly. It's quite a roller-coaster, this widowerhood skylark, I must say...
Coo, the nights start drawing in after another week or so!!!! (Joke.)
Take care Aunty Ivy and say "hi" to cousin Jayne.

Me


Good heavens! Sir Christopher Kelly's opening remarks (as he inquires into the tangled web that is our MPs and their often bizarre, stupid, foolish, greedy, fraudulent and downright shameful expenses claims) suggest he thinks MPs lacked principles and were using the system for their personal gain. Now there's a surprise! Wonder how long before he's replaced? Ethics isn't just the name of a county spoken by someone who lisps.

Ho hum. Time (13:18) for a spot of lunch, and then I think I shall toddle off out on a mini-adventure or two.

Criminal responsibility

A fascinating examination of an intractable set of problems. Of course, the older-fashioned among us might mutter "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time" but what on earth is the best way of dealing with the 11,000 ten to thirteen-year olds "nicked" every year, let alone the 100,000+ among the older teen set? I suspect we get the society we deserve, as well as the MPs. But, remind me, where are the parents? (Apparently, very often either or both drunk or high. Or simply absent.)

I still recall the terror and guilt I felt in the 1950s when an affable "Bobby" took my name and address (probably not even writing them down, of course) over the matter of a scrumped apple. Times change. And film director Alfred Hitchcock's father actually had him locked up overnight as a never-forgotten lesson.

DABbed to death

Not one of the 46 numbered paragraphs or 13 pages of Chapter 3b: Radio: going digital (buried inside "Digital Britain — Final Report") — downloadable from here — makes any mention of any alternative to DAB for their damned radio switchover. Naturally, DAB is the only technology I have deliberately failed to embrace. I don't like the way they've crammed far too many crappy channels in and necessarily reduced the bitrate available. I have no problem at all with all national radio stations being moved off FM and AM to digital, but let's not limit ourselves to DAB, heh? Terrestrial digital TV and satellite digital TV technologies both permit excellent national radio of very high technical quality.

The Exec summary does at least recognise these alternatives, but seems happy to dismiss them. But what, pray tell, is one to make of this un-proofread figure?

Digital UK 1

Or this one?

Digital UK 2

There's a fascinating set of media ownership rules on page 155, by the way. And the only joke (as far as I can tell) is buried in paragraph 56 on page 201. IBM's fair hand appears on page 210. ("Heat map"? Gimme a break!) And I see Phorm is now hiding behind "behavioural advertising".

  

Footnotes

1  I guess I must be at least a parsec away from the target demographic of Meyer's story, but I found it very engaging and will now get hold of the book (or books, as I think there are four of them).
2  Or "making it up as we went along".
3  Newton's laws of motion and a computer roughly the equivalent of a programmable calculator got us to the moon 40 years ago. Quants and their somewhat more sophisticated computerised trading systems helped ensure nobody can afford that trip these days.
4  Recall I met the newly-discovered "half" aunt Sue last December.