2009 — 15 August: Saturday
As I said, one of the most delightful things about Christa was her habit of smiling every time she saw me.1 So, to tonight's picture of her, taken a year or so after we'd moved into this house in 1981:
Crockpot ahoy! But not for a few hours yet. G'night.
Safe flight
I was delighted to see that my pair of "bear-o-planes" touched down safely in New Zealandland and have found a receptive hangar:
Wasn't it nice to be just two years old?
In other, lesser, news the next crockpot is launched on its simmering journey. Dead pig instead of dead sheep this time, so I omitted the mint sauce. (Friend Brack tells me I should become a full vegetarian; although he's probably right2 I didn't much care for the semi-fascistic tone of some of the web propaganda he directed me to examine.) On a related theme, this is fascinating.
Is that the time?
I've always been a sucker for time-travel stories. This intrigued me. Source and snippet:
1) This is the only universe you've got
2) You can't visit any time before your time machine was built
3) You can't kill your own grandfather
4) You don't have nearly as much free will as you think you do
For my correspondent who claims to "consult Mrs Google more often than I eat (but not yet more often than I take breath)" here's a salutary warning.
Thanks, Mr. Postie
I could have done without the reminder of my next annual car service, but am pleased to have a fresh batch (two Blu-ray and one DVD) of viewing:
- The Assassin
A worthy remake (by John "Wargames" Badham) of Luc Besson's glorious La femme Nikita which I first had on LaserDisc - The Fall
Having (briefly) been tempted by The Cell in Woolies some while ago, I decided to take a chance on this new one by the now mono-named "Tarsem" - The Chain
Jack Rosenthal's wonderful script. How can this be quarter of a century old?
Somebody pinch me
The BBC's national radio news reports that a UK politician has just been attacked for telling the public what they wanted to hear. I bet that's the first time that's ever happened. Ho hum. It's 18:11 and that crockpot is smelling very good.
Rats! Beethoven's 9th is off my listening list for the foreseeable future — not that anyone can foresee the future, of course. It's not that tonight's Prom was no good... it was just the unstoppable flood of tears during the final movement, dammit. Well, I suppose I can still listen to it in the privacy of my own home, I guess. But who wants to see a grown man cry? Not me!
Still, in other news I've stumbled across a nice little toy from NAD: a CD player into which you can plug a USB hard drive (with MP3s and WMA files) and a separate input into which you can route a digital audio signal to exploit the high-quality sample rate conversion and 24-bit decoding circuitry contained in the player. Now that's a neat trick...
Naturally, I've been playing around with the audio side of my A/V system just to see how this might look:
I've also learned that the first album by Hunter Muskett has finally (finally!) been released on CD. It's not the one with the wonderful track "John Blair" on it, but it's better than nothing. I've asked Mr. Amazon to get right on it.