2009 — 26 July: Sunday
It's going to be even busier later today than I first suspected, as Junior has just told me he'll also be joining the merry Mounce throng. Need sleep. But first, a picture of Christa in Old Windsor back in 1974, very early in our relationship:
Time? Don't talk to me about Time.
G'night.
Funny women
It's taken a while — longer than for my initial cuppa to cool and be drunk — but I finally found something mildly amusing in today's web browsing. It's a comment appended to a piece by Victoria Coren in the Observer. Snippet:
Linda Smith was very funny, and should always be remembered for her classic description of the Royal Family as 'Carnival day on the Island of Dr Moreaux'. (sic)
Oh well, it's 09:24, cloudy without actually raining, and I'm still reeling from the shock of my one a.m. session with Mike Dyson (Iris will get that).
This damn' nearly made me smile, too: "I realize we're in a period of correction away from idealized models of perfectly rational markets, but I doubt the alpha-monkeys1-flinging-feces-at-each-other model will prove substantially more predictive". (Source.)
Markets rational? Do me a favour.
Overdue revisit
I follow the delightful "xkcd" web comic from time to time, but I'd managed to miss the "ball pit" item from the related "Blag". Mind you, I was rather preoccupied back in November 2007.
Better get some breakfast before I get too descended upon. Bro has just (10:15) appeared. One down, three to go. John managed to paint the window frame but, alas, he also dislodged and broke my cheap sheet of secondary glazing. It was only about four years old, dammit.
Phew!
It's 16:59 and the house is now quietening down. Claire drove us all to the Bridge at Shawford, so I've now been in a BMW 4x4...
... yikes, street cred shot to blazes. (Well... I assume it's a 4x4; what do I know?)
I let the moths out of my wallet, and then — for "afters" — I relocated Bro upstairs with his laptop in the study, where he could use the iMac's network connection while I showed the three youngsters ...
... a film downstairs. (That's niece #1, son #1, and niece #3.) It was clear after the film that I've now unleashed upon the world a further two members of "Team Edward" (Robert Pattinson). The younger generation are now wending their separate ways back up to London, but we've agreed to meet up there next weekend, with an overnight stay and an inevitable sidetrip to inspect the Shuttleworth collection at Old Warden.
Tarpaulin (or is that appalling TARP)?
Those TARP funds ("Troubled Assets Relief Program") mentioned in the psychiatry quote on "Slate" yesterday? I've only just idly poked at "TARP" to see what nastiness is concealed under it. Turns out the US bank bailout (aka TARP) may cost taxpayers over there in the land of the free as much as $23.7 trillion. That's some bailout! Naturally, the accuracy of the estimate is being very heavily criticised. Not least because it won't all fit inside a single brown envelope?
Later
Bro has been fed, again. Bro has been entertained, again. (Must be nice to be on holiday, I guess!) I offered him the choice of John McNaughton's "Wild Things" or John Herzfeld's equally deviously twisted "2 days in the valley" but since he didn't seem to recognise the names of any of the cast in either film I went with the McNaughton partly because I have it on Blu-ray in the American "unrated" version. He seemed to enjoy it. It's now 22:32 and we're both listening to Guy Garvey's "finest hour" while pottering away on PCs.