2009 — 6 July: Monday
Midnight — again. Tonight's picture of Christa is from September1 or October 1982. Big Bro was in town, as was dear Mama, and we were either about to head up to the Midlands, or had just returned from there. The plan was to visit Bro's pal Terry (who was to go on to become a millionaire airline boss, I believe, but with whom I fear I recall having a political argument — not all John's pals are quite to my taste) and to give Christa a break from such a concentrated dose of Mounces under her roof for a few hours:
G'night.
Plans ça change
What with the rain, and a sore throat phoning in, the trip down to Exbury for a foursome ramble is now mutating into a more local duo ramble to the north-east somewhere. Time to pack in breakfast and a packed lunch. It's 09:01 and the short, sharp shower has stopped.
How about a paragraph of provocation for a Monday morning? "No" to legal euthanasia? Good ol' bishops!
Let us note how the archbishops and rabbi stand together to block progress towards more humane laws. Technically, of course, each archbishop is doctrinally obliged to regard the other
one and the rabbi as one or more of heretic, infidel or apostate; their organisations spent most of history fighting, persecuting and executing each other; indeed all religions have to
regard all other religions as getting it wrong and misleading their votaries.
But when the religions are after a common goal, as with getting our tax money for their faith-based schools, or exemption from discrimination laws, or seats in parliament, they are a
united front. This used to be called hypocrisy, but no doubt modern theology has come up with a convoluted polysyllable to redefine it.
Given what killed Christa, I also keep an eye on diet and health articles (though her diet was supposedly a helluva lot healthier than mine). And bad science is always 'asking for it' to be read.
Back...
... just in time to hear the 15:00 "pips" and the news of Robert McNamara's death. I think I shall treat the battered bod to a shower rather warmer than the one we enjoyed at the start of our six mile ramble around Hinton Ampner. And Mike has lent me the Blu-ray edition of Twilight for me to do a side-by-side comparison between that and my SD copy. Though why the Blu-ray has gone up from £9-88 to £14-88 in a month is anyone's guess. I've also just bought his NTSC copy of "Milk" off him as he's decided (mad fool) that he wants the Blu-ray of that. I recall a documentary about Harvey Milk about 20 years ago on TV, and I remember it making me very angry at the time. No doubt modern theology has by now come up with a convoluted polysyllable to redefine bigotry.
Just had an amusing email from my ex-ICL chum Ian H, whom I've put in touch with my ex-IBM (and ex-ICL) chum Ian B in hopes that the latter can help the former with some Drupal mysteries. Ian H signs off: "Now, I must away to the doctor for another two months worth of little yellow pills to keep the anxiety / melancholia / heebie-jeebies away... still no cure for the summertime serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine) shortage, only a workaround." Surely the pills should be blue, not yellow?
Several laughs lurk...
... within a sort-of interview with AC Grayling from yesterday's "Observer", so he's getting two quotes today, lucky chap. Source and snippets:
I recently retraced on foot a famous journey that William Hazlitt made from Shropshire to Somerset to visit Wordsworth and Coleridge. I spent two weeks slogging through
nettle beds before I realised the bastard had taken the coach.
I spent the first 13 years of my life in Zambia. In Africa you can't walk in the countryside and think. You might be eaten by a lion. You have to read instead.
It's been raining again, but there's a lovely patch of blue sky visible from my study. Mustn't grumble.
The disadvantage of watching a film with a realistic surround sound depiction of a thunderstorm is you realise, almost too late, that that's actually real rain and real thunder outside and you'd better nip upstairs to check the skylight is closed.
It's 18:59 and I guess that was one of those isolated heavy showers the BBC mentioned. Another irritation of the Blu-ray is the fact it took me nearly 15 minutes, combing through the manual, to find out a) what the two discrete little on-screen symbols that wouldn't go away even meant,2 and b) exactly which bit of the setup process would allow me to banish them. And — worse — I'd altered another setting3 meanwhile that meant a little popup video-in-video window showed up outlining (from one of the "extras" features, I presume) exactly how a particular dramatic effect had been filmed. Interesting, certainly, but not in the middle of the bloody movie, please. It didn't do much for that vital "willing suspension of disbelief", I can tell you. Which knot-headed programmer thought that was a cool feature?