2009 — 8 August: Saturday

For tonight, a picture of Christa on the beach at Bournemouth in the early 1980s. She was an excellent swimmer:

Christa in Bournemouth, early 1980s

The evening's entertainment — not counting the dishes and the laundry — (finally) included the short film "Six Shooter" by the chap who went on to make "In Bruges". It won an Oscar in 2005. I also took a stab at several other recent items, finishing with the first episode from Season #4 of "House". Trouble is, I remembered the twist from its original broadcast. Somehow, I'm still finding reading more relaxing than viewing at the moment, but my mood obviously varies.

G'night.

Sleep having fled...

... after really not quite enough of the stuff, I'm listening to yet more "Sounds of the 60s", cuppa in hand, and six shirts out on the washing line in the sun from a cloudless blue sky. Mind you, there was an almost autumnal cool in the air when I first sniffed it an hour or so ago. It's now 08:39 and my initial Firefox session (with the "new, improved" 3.5.2 version) got off to a self-confessed embarrassing start (their words) by failing to restart properly. I noticed it didn't shut down cleanly last night (in the sense that I had to close a popup explicitly during shutdown despite having supposedly closed the browser before shutting down the PC). I was too tired to do any investigation last night, however.

Bozo Sapiens

Wonderful title for an interesting blog. Here's a snippet from my favourite entry so far:

Love: what are the odds?
True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow — more like a steeple than a bell. It's called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian cavalry.

Michael Kaplan in Bozo Sapiens


It also led me here. Almost too interesting, as I see my cuppa is now cold.

Morning, Mr Postie...

To retain my credentials as a completeist I was vaguely looking into the West Wing complete boxed set from time to time. I now seem to have missed the window of opportunity to grab it at its lowest price point. (I bought each season separately, of course, as they became available.) I have just allowed myself to buy a repackaged Season #1, partly because I was intrigued to note that its "censorship" rating has risen from "12" on my original set to "15". Partly because it has a couple of documentary extras. Partly because, at £8-97 for more than 15 hours of just about the finest TV drama ever written it's basically as irresistible as Bella's blood is to Edward!

I could have done without the credit card bill, and merely note that the Bosch fridge/freezer is now over five years old and that the insurance company still touting (in vain) for business is another outfit that doesn't know "Mrs CH Mounce" has left the building.

I didn't realise the art of ghostwriting now extended to peer-reviewed scientific papers. But then I was also blissfully unaware of yet another acronym for "IBM": inclusion body myositis. That big Pharma will get you every time.

Quarter of a century ago

I missed the BBC4 programme on the miners' strike back in March. But I intend to catch it tonight. The world seems very different now in so many ways. (But I still smile when I read the Ravenscraig picket line quote here.)

And, just one year later, the "Pick of the Pops" programme has been reminding me that 1985 was not completely bereft of decent music. I wonder what sort of cheque 24 years of royalties adds up to for, say, Annie Lennox?

Later

Some while ago, after I'd belatedly discovered the genius that is Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice", I was quite taken by Janet Aylmer's 1996 retelling of that tale from Darcy's point of view in the form of "Darcy's story". Today, I was similarly delighted to discover that Stephenie Meyer had begun the same experiment in retelling her "Twilight" tale from the male protagonist's point of view. Unfortunately, when an unofficial draft of the first chapter was leaked, she was quite rightly upset and halted this experiment. However, she's decided to post a link to the PDF file of that chapter, which I thought was very promising. (Both the decision, and the fragment of text.) You can find it on her official website (maintained by her brother Seth) here.

My windows are currently firmly shut against the noise of what I suspect is a birthday party across the road. It's somehow already 21:15 and I'm looking forward to the first walk of the month tomorrow — weather permitting.