2009 — 24 August: Monday
Tonight's picture of Christa shows her smiling (and when did she ever not smile?) on the stairs in the Old Windsor house:
It's quite late — 02:03 or so — and I've been having a bit of a simplification epiphany for much of the evening just concluding. Results here. But now, it's definitely time for some sleep. G'night.
Facing the (TV) facts
Clambering sluggishly back towards some form of consciousness just over an hour ago (it's now 11:17 already) and with the first cuppa of the day safely imbibed, I can face with more equanimity the simple fact (revealed by a swift skim of the info on offer — thanks, Ian — here) that Big Bro's chosen country not only has 30,000,000 or so sheep, but also already has nationwide HDTV both terrestrially and from satellite.1 It also has kit that delivers component video via SCART leads, but that's another story...
Speaking of which, I have removed both the DVDO Edge scaler and the superfluous OPPO 983H DVD player from my system. So not only do I now actually have a suitable physical gap in which to plonk the upcoming NAD CD player (and its outboard USB-connected disc drive), but I'm now back to the sort of simplicity I last enjoyed in the mid-1990s. (But with three extra audio channels.) The Audiolab amplifier is fairly awesome, and then some. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Well, loudspeakers. Or maybe breakfast.
Crawling from the primordial ooze... dept.
How often do you get an excuse to use that adjective? This made me smile:
The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection (whether by dropping it into the primordial ooze or writing its eventual emergence into the initial conditions of the universe or whatever)...
For starters, there are plenty of evolutionary biologists who believe that evolution, given long enough, was likely to create a smart, articulate species — not our species, complete with five fingers, armpits and all the rest — but some social species with roughly our level of intelligence and linguistic complexity.
In recent emails the topic of the level of utter c**p on the UK's broadcast TV has been touched on.2 Skimming briefly through "Big Brother" (inter alia) in the wee small hours as I tested my re-assembled3 system, I was struck by the charmless Neanderthal demeanour of one slack-jawed knuckle scraper. So much for that linguistic complexity.
The joys of the (other) Tube
Reasons to avoid the London Underground at this time of year:
There's no air-con on the underground, so on a hot day people quickly resemble clothed piglets trapped in a can, waiting for the air to run out. In these circumstances, the Persil ad was downright sarcastic; not a harmless video, but a magic window showing what life could be, if only you weren't stuck in a stinking, clammy-walled pipe, glumly jostling for space with fellow victims.
I used to enjoy taking Peter there, though, on our usual bookshop runs in the school holidays. Not to mention the museums. It all now seems very distant, somehow. Jolly good job Amazon exists. (Other online retailers are available, so I'm told.)
Where went the day?
It's 17:17. The next set of crockpot ingredients is safely gathered in, with one or two further essentials of modern life (ketchup, for example, and tea bags). Quite a few weeds have transpired their last, as has several metres of nasty bramble. Ouch. The grapes and pears are coming on apace, Christa. And I've finally retrieved the latest postal offering from behind the venetian blinds.
