2009 — 26 October: Monday
It's just gone midnight, so while Bob Dylan's sublime "Theme Time Radio Hour" swings along, it's time for tonight's picture of Christa (and me) dating from 1982 and taken by Big Bro on one of his — literally — flying visits from faraway New Zealandland:
For a change (from "Carnivàle") I treated myself to the final part of "Emma" (in hi-def, naturally) followed by our Melvyn1 chatting amiably to author Nick Hornby, touching on (among other things) the very promising new film he scripted based on Lynn Barber's "education" memoir. And, if I wasn't so tired, I'd still be watching the documentary on photography. There are some evenings when there's actually stuff on TV worth watching, it seems.
Continuing yesterday's mildly religious theme, the latest "Jesus and Mo" strip cracked me up. Don't miss the little "Guardian" headline! Nice touch... "Vatican to C of E: we want your bigots." Lovely. Bang on target, too (as ever). G'night.
Bright and sunny
What lacks the morning? Well, just a cuppa, I guess. I'll get right on it. It's 08:52 and I've only recently woken — faintly shocking, I know. But I'm retired! (And to think I used to be a wage slave...)
Land of the free? I don't think so. (Evidence.) I suppose all guvmints become paranoid. And people like Duncan Campbell and Peter Laurie many years ago convinced me that the police in this green and peasant gland exist mostly to protect the guvmint against "their" citizens, rather than (say) me against crime. Better not get into a (police) state about it. Don't want to end up on yet more ineptly programmed and dubiously linked databases, do I?
Apparently the chap in charge of this skylark (yclept Anton Setchell) says people who find themselves on the databases "should not worry at all". (Begs the question how you find yourself on a secret database, of course. Just wait until a printout shows up on a council tip, perhaps? Or a discarded CD-ROM?) However the same chap said on another occasion:
Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police, everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.
Just think where I could have ended up had I had the ability to think logically like that...
Meanwhile...
... back in the real world, I see skeptics are still inquiring, Martin Gardner and Susan Blackmore among them. Great stuff.
Question is, do I download the Ubuntu 9.10 release candidate or do I hang on for another two or three days? The release notes have a few neat gotchas in them — I think I can wait.
I've been waiting a while for today's dollop from Mr Postie. How can it be over 22 years since "Tutti Frutti"? Amazing. I saw the DVD set in Borders down in Bournemouth a couple of days before my birthday, but I didn't like the High Street asking price. I missed "Asylum" when it was first transmitted, but it looks very enticing.
Young Mr Postie smiled a little uncertainly when I told him I supported the Royal Mail industrial action. But then he didn't know I've basically tended to side with workers against management since my first-ever industrial dispute back in those distant aeronautical engineering apprenticeship days in Hatfield nearly 40 years ago. I'm not saying "da management" is always wrong, but that assumption does, more often than not, seem to make a reasonable starting point.
Somebody tell me...
... why brambles are so invasive. Still, a spot of minor-league weeding, the harvesting of yet more grapes, a touch more with the Dyson — I feel positively virtuous. Virginia (Ironside) warned me in her book that there would be "up" days and "down" days. She got that right. It's 17:23 and already rather dark out there, though it's been dry so far today. Time for a cuppa, methinks.
Why does the choice of wristwatch chosen by various Russian leaders consume two minutes of the BBC's national radio news? Bizarre!
That's enough of my PC for a while. It's 21:18 and time for a change of venue. Down I go...