2009 — 24 September: Thursday
One of the highlights of October 1959 for me was my eighth birthday. Unbeknownst to me (as they say) on that same month my future wife and the younger of her two brothers posed alongside my future parents-in-law on part of the terrace of their Meisenheim house:
Georg, Christa, Mutti and Vati, October 1959 in Meisenheim
Right. Just about time to unload the washing machine and then call it a day. We traversed quite a few contour lines today.
G'night.
What is it...
... about the (political) right in America that allows a Republican to explain how all pornography is homosexual and will make the children of that fine country "perverts"? And receive rapturous applause? Eye-watering stuff from NPR now that the feed is restored. Meanwhile the sun is shining, there's one of those "nips" in the air, and it's clearly time for a cuppa.
Now, here's a fascinating set of "Grauniad" comments1 in the wake of an article searching for the UK's middle class. One asserts that (rather like Justice Potter Stewart,2 trying in 1964 to define obscenity) you know it when you see it...
I shall have to change my channel. I've just heard that North Americans bought 9,000,000,000 bullets last year. (I wonder how many of those were made in the UK?)
High noon
Time to go replenish a shelf or two of the fridge. (Meanwhile chum Roger tells me his fridge — the second in 50 years — has just gone bang. Hope this doesn't de-rail his flatscreen TV plans.) Ho hum. I have just laid plans for an afternoon tea expotition.
Better later than never
Tea having been slurped, my next little excursion has been aloft into that Aladdin's cave that some might call a "loft". There is altogether much too much to examine up there, and quite a lot to discard — including the tiny "Tiny" IBM PC/AT clone that I bought Christa nearly 20 years ago at one of the Acorn shows. DR/DOS 5, heh? Those were indeed the days. It's the size of a standard housebrick, though rather heavier, and I'm pretty sure she only kept it either because she was so taken with the technology or maybe because it was the first PC she had from "new" just for herself rather than passed along from me or Peter. Still, she certainly earned its cost many times over, bless her.
But how and when did it become 17:15 already?
I've also been picking my way through some of the CDs I have up there as I've freed up the entire contents of the chest of drawers under the stairs. That will do to hold a few hundred of the things. Now that I've upgraded much of the audio system, I may as well delude myself into thinking that I can tell the difference between uncompressed .wav files on a CD and VBR mp3 files ripped at a nominal 320Kbps. Besides, I have a hankering to play the occasional particular favourite CD without first firing up the iMac and hunting out the corresponding mp3 files. So, among the silver platters just brought downstairs (down ladder, technically) is one of the first three CDs I ever bought: Ry Cooder's 1979 album Bop till you drop (as mentioned here).
Scanning along
I also lugged down a couple of boxes full of DVD artwork and packages, many of which fell through some of the recent cracks in my life. So I'm now grooving along to "Radcliffe & Maconie" while slowly filling in the gaps in my DVD artwork gallery for displaying on the iMac downstairs. It's 21:45 and very dark outside.