2009 — 19 June: Friday
Suddenly it's after midnight. I'll sort out my next picture of Christa in the morning, methinks. I'm glad it's not just me who thinks the pitiful publication of our tawdry MPs' tawdry expenses "details" are — in their redacted format — stupid, insulting, and arrogant. Not to mention pointless. They still don't get it, do they? That is, after all, my money they are happily misspending... (Repayments!)
Dad used to mutter "hanging's too good for them". I can't say I disagree. G'night!
Don't tell Christa...
But the terrain in the vicinity of the corkscrew hazelnut is more than a bit like a jungle now. 'Twas not ever thus:
While I still don't know exactly what bits of floral genitalia get so irritatingly up my nose, I can reveal that whatever was floating around in the air shortly after midnight set off an eye-watering sneezing fit that would have rendered me incapable of driving had I been at the wheel. Thank goodness for air con with a pollen filter. Things are a bit better now (it's 10:11 and sunny) but I won't be flinging the windows wide for a bit.
At 11:51, and having tanked up, I await the Man from the Ministry with his (perhaps, computerised?) clipboard.
And, at 13:42, said Man (and his computerised clipboard) has departed. It seems I represent some 1,600 of my fellow citizens scattered across our green and peasant gland. And, if some of the questions are any guide, some of my fellow citizens get up to some fairly odd1 behaviour. Quite fascinating. Right! What's next, Mrs Landingham? A little something for the weekend, perhaps? Or even for some of yesterday's nettle stings?
Oddly, given the topic of the survey was British crime, I've just received a nicely illiterate email from a Russian who wants to give me 40% of an amount in excess of US$40.5M. This must be my lucky day.
On safer ground
My friend Carol is a keen fan of Microsoft's "Comic Sans" font — there's always one, I guess. So when she spotted the item I mentioned from the Wall Street Journal about this she took me to task. I have therefore offered her a small set of decent alternatives she may like to consider — a swatch of fonts, if you will:
Fonts have always struck me as a delicious fusion of art(ifice) and engineering. I mainly got interested in them after meeting the delightful Acorn RISC OS font manager. Before then, my adventures had mostly involved costly Letraset experiments.
Later
Safely back from supplies runs to Southampton for the head, and to the local Waitrose for the bod. Alas, the head will have to go unfed apart from this morning's delivery of the new edition of Park Yunnie's wartime memoirs... (click the pic for details):
I first read these nearly half a century ago when Big Bro bought a paperback copy. And somehow I wasn't surprised to discover, from an afterword by the author's son, that Yunnie met his end fighting communism in the new Congo Republic in 1961.
But at least the bod has a new set of crockpottery "clay" to mould into something tasty and nutricious, probably tomorrow morning. And probably while listening to Brian Matthew. I'm becoming a creature of habit. (Or is this "normal"?)
Good grief! Johnny Hallyday is 66. He was excellent in L'Homme du train in 2002 with Jean Rochefort.
Abuzz
I've spent (wasted) too much time in a vain search — I'm not a registered user — of the Ecologist.org site for the original article that contains this amusing extract:
"I got into bee farming because my hands won't fit up their arse," Tony [Spacey] tells me by way of introduction. "I come from a farming background in southern Africa. When I was four I saw my grandfather's arm well and truly buried in an uncomfortable place in a cow and the old boy turned and smiled at me and said, 'One day, you can do this.' From then on I decided to become a soldier."
Time for a bite to eat, methinks. A honey sandwich, perhaps?
Later still
After a successful dollop of chicken in lemon sauce, peas and spuds, I successfully downloaded, unzipped, cut to CD, and used said CD to upgrade the firmware in the Pioneer Blu-ray player (I suspect a new level of Java went in, buried somewhere in the 97MB of digital gorp). And then I correctly figured I would just have time to make sure I hadn't broken the multi-region hack by watching the gloriously OTT final double episode of my Region 1 Boston Legal season #5 DVD before moving over to satellite for a dose of HIGNFY. The best laid plans, heh? It seems HIGNFY must have come to an end last week. Given the ongoing shenanigans of our political lords and masters, that's a great shame.
Still, now I don't have to rush the extras. I must say, Boston Legal never took itself too seriously and has been wildly entertaining. Christa very much enjoyed the first three seasons — I just wish she were still around to have seen the rest with me. <Sigh>
For a reason I cannot begin to explain, a BBC message board devoted to discussions of that ever so long-running radio serial "The Archers" has somewhere on it2 a link to somewhere on my little web site. Riddle me that!