2009 — 18 August: Tuesday
It's just gone midnight — having exchanged light banter with Big Bro (who cheekily reminded me to use a blade to remove dry paint runs from my windows) — it's time for tonight's picture of Christa:
Taken as she stood in the doorway of our rented flat in Old Windsor. As I believe I may have mentioned before, she had a delightful tendency to smile whenever she saw me...
G'night.
What a way...
... to start the sunny new day. Overnight, Big Bro sent me the text from an article in the Independent just over a week ago. The basic thesis is that those who can afford it (the Chinese, inter alia) are busily buying up land and associated resources in (to them) far-off lands and repatriating the profits and produce of this fine, capitalist, enterprise. A game we began many years ago, though I'm not sure we did much buying. Source and snippet:
"Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a British government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of
the economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for
the next 99 years back to China,"...
"Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords
would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people...
"Then, imagine that, after a few years — and bearing in mind that recession and the plummeting pound have already made it difficult for Britain to buy food from abroad — an oil-price
spike or an environmental disaster in one of the world's big grain-producing nations drives global food prices sharply upwards, and beyond the reach of many Britons. While the Chinese next door
in Wales continue sending rice back to China, the starving British look helplessly on, ruing the day their government sold off half their arable land. Some of them plot the violent recapture of
the Welsh valleys."
Simone Weil may not have been right after all. But John Christopher probably was. Happy days.
Call me "Debugger"
While I wouldn't have a clue about how to fix my little Firefox browser's "problem" I can now predictably make it lock up and consume all of one of my two processor cores. All I have to do is be using either the Copernic local indexing tool or the Java-based Highways Agency traffic maps applet. I'm left having to kill the Firefox process, which generally leads to the "Well, this is embarrassing..." message when I next take it out for a surf. Of course, now that I've visited the Copernic site, I see a bug fix that deals with "an issue with Firefox 3.5 indexing" came out 12 days ago, so I shall install it and see what happens.
The morning started sunny, but there's a remarkably dark cloud on the horizon, considerably bigger than a man's hand. Time (10:10) for a bite to eat.
Something delicious this way comes...
Well, that's the current plan. I shall investigate the charred remains in the oven in about another 35 minutes and see if I can still make a meal of it. It's 13:00 and the dark clouds have hardly budged, but at least they have also so far failed to disgorge the rain they contain. My Pioneer Blu-ray player is securely packed, ready for its move to a new home. Now, if only Superfi would hurry up and deliver the Audiolab gear, I can similarly displace the Onkyo box. Christa would doubtless urge me to be patient, but I've never really seen that as one of the virtues.
The Retail Price Index1 remains negative. Pah!
It's 16:48 and — obviously, given my recent caller — time to read my gas and electricity meters. Such an exciting life, heh? How cost-effective can it be, I wonder, for a young lady to toddle round in a little car stopping at whatever subset of the houses hereabouts share a combined gas and electricity supplier. (I still blame la Thatch.)
I wonder how many of these...
... I shall have to delete before they give up?
The clumsy English. The URL behind the offered link. The fact that my bank doesn't send such emails. How very tedious. Nearly as depressing as the six o'clock news. According to Mr. IMF all will be well if the US of A exports more, and Asia imports more. Glad it was that simple. <Sigh>
This story depresses me (though I suspect its intention is at least partially to amuse) but the prospect of this cheers me up. Remember this? I'm hungry. It's 19:27 and time for a bite to eat.