2009 — 21 June: Sunday

Just been watching the delicious "tango" segment from the Peter Chelsom remake of Shall we dance? because I like the Gotan Project's music. And so to tonight's photo of Christa, which shows her with Mike and Bob in April 2004 when we visited the Gorch Fock German navy training ship down in Southampton Harbour.

Christa in Southampton, April 2004

Bits and PCs

I decided to add two new web browsers to my Windows system just for fun: Opera and Safari. The latter is five times larger than the former. One has to wonder why. I shall also have another play with the latest build of the GIMP. I'm trying to decide precisely what subset of applications¹ I still need Windows for, and am vaguely contemplating a complete XP re-installation. Like an old carpet, I find Windows needs to be taken out and beaten soundly from time to time to dislodge all the crud that accumulates. And it's usually better to do that before the inevitable crash rather than after...

Besides, I'm retired! G'night.

Solstice?

How can that possibly be? And already 10:35, too. Put kettle on... By the way, that shirt button? This helped! I can now imagine the conversation with dear Mama: My computer taught me how to sew on a button. "What's a computer?"

Speaking of old dears, I see I've just missed what would have been Pauline ("Kiss, kiss, bang, bang") Kael's 90th birthday. Now there was a woman who could write about films. In fact, the New Yorker magazine is still full of good writing. This chap for example (born in my hometown) waxes very lyrical 35 years after that classic by Robert Persig. Source and snippet:

Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of "primary America." Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig's narrator. He's never happier than when he's rebuilding a master cylinder or dislodging a stuck oil seal, and his descriptions of the open road can seem slightly anticlimactic. For him, the journey is just the journey; the garage is the destination. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond. His book is called "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work" (Penguin; $25.95), and it's intended as a challenge, a declaration of gearhead pride in an ever more gearless world.

Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker

"Gearhead pride". Isn't that wonderful?

What an ego!

I knew a lady in IBM, only a twig or two from the top of the tree, whose ego was approximately (IMHO) the size of the Rock of Gibraltar. (I once had to give her a five-minute presentation on a bit of work I'd been doing, but that's another story.) Well, it seems one of the contenders for the now-vacant post of Speaker of the House of Commons could teach her a thing or two. Take a bow, Ann Widdecombe!

A now dead member of the Thatcher government told me all of 19 years ago (and I should have published it then): "There is a monstrous deception. MPs don't like being written to and being told, 'It's all very well for you, you've got an MP's salary, while I have to get along on a pension' and so what they do is have a relatively low salary — although it's still quite high — and get themselves paid large sums of money in expenses which are not taxable... It's a way of concealing from the electorate."

Dominic Lawson in The Times

It's hard not to conclude that perhaps it would really be better to get shot of all present and immediate-past MPs and start afresh... The stench is becoming intolerable. And, I suspect, the "Untied Kingdom" is looking daily more ridiculous from outside — if only because of the banal triviality of the nature of "our" political corruption.

Confession time

I find (to my bemusement) that I have become somewhat of a fan of the Daily Torygraph.² And not just because they have been running with the story of our delightful MPs for a month now. Where else could you learn that John Julius Norwich (he of the wonderful "Christmas Crackers" anthologies) "is also said to have slept with Margaret Thatcher's grandmother, one of his servants". Somehow, that's just too delicious a morsel. (Source.)

And, after my delicious lunch, it's definitely time (14:43) for a cuppa. It would have been good walking weather today but Mike (my partner in countryside crime) is away at a family birthday bash this weekend up in Crewe. Gives my blister time to heal and the nettle rash (which is now a vivid colour) time to fade. Walking with Mike is dangerous fun. If you click the pic you'll see my previous injury, a few inches from the site of the present one:

Pheasant attack, January 2008

An unprovoked attack, described here.

Unmissable, and (happily) unmissed! Magical.

Footnotes

¹ For example, I'm no longer using either the Humax Freeview PVR or the DVDO video scaler, both of which needed firmware upgrades from time to time, delivered via a Windows application and an older style RS232C serial port. By comparison, the Blu-ray player and the Oppo DVD player use a CD and a USB memory stick respectively and are operating system neutral. But I would be loath to give up Xara Xtreme; after all I've been using it in one form or another since the days of "Artworks" on my Acorn RISC machines twenty years ago. And I'm still dithering over my final choice of database, while getting by remarkably well in the meantime on a series of simple flat files and some adroit editing and sorting.
² Dad was a loyal subscriber (though largely for the cryptic crossword) and — now that I come to think of it — the paper twice changed the course of my life. First, I'm pretty sure it was the Telegraph that advertised the writing job in ICL Beaumont that I successfully applied for in late 1973 while in my final year of an aeronautical engineering apprenticeship. Second, I know it was the Telegraph that ran a story in early 1974 that I read in the vicar's copy (in Old Windsor). The lively argument Christa and I had over that story rapidly convinced me that I'd met a lively-minded woman who was "the one" for me. (I lost the argument, by the way — that was a novel experience, too!)