2009 — 21 November: Saturday
I'm falling asleep here. It's now 00:49. Before I nod off, here's one of my very last pictures of Christa — from September 2007, and our 33rd wedding anniversary:
Looking back, I think (on balance) I was very glad that she remained fully compos mentis until just a few hours before her death, when the sedation had been kicked into high gear. She was considerably smarter than me and I would have hated to see her mind do a HAL 9000 on me. I reckon I'm going to miss her until my own brain goes mushy. (Some might say that process is already well advanced, of course. How would I know?)
On that, possibly macabre, thought — g'night.
A day for humping...
... surplus hi-fi and video stuff up into the loft. I've decided the living room has been untidy enough for quite long enough now. Besides, it's drizzling gently outside, and Mother Hubbard's cupboard isn't yet bare, so I don't have to go anywhere. I don't want to get my new tyres wet, do I? It's 10:47 and — if I was doing what Big Bro wants — I would be spending my time sorting out lots of tiny pieces of paper with dried saliva on them for him. I think not. That's his hobby, not one of mine (though I admit I've been quite surprised to see just how many stamps and letters Christa had salted away for one of those long-term ambitions of hers).
Good grief! I've just heard a bit of Pat Boone's version of "Tutti Frutti". A travesty indeed. And payola was rife throughout the American music radio scene... now there's a surprise.
"Comment is Free"
I have made just one comment on any form of public forum (other than my own) "outside" IBM. And it was hardly contentious: I was protesting the Guardian's unwise decision to drop the popular "Doonesbury" strip on the entirely false grounds that they had no room for it when they downsized the paper to Berliner tabloid size. Since then, I've been watching the explosion in online "engagement", and sometimes find some of the comments to outshine the original articles. Only sometimes, of course. Though (30+ years on) I no longer buy the Guardian every day (Christa would be surprised, I think) I still read some of the "Comment is Free" (CiF) stuff. Here's one I agree with:
Some of the solecisms you find in the comments following CiF articles are enough to make you despair of the education system — grammatical and spelling mistakes abound, and as for fallacies of argument...
But it gets so much worse when you navigate away from CiF. Take a look at the comments on the Times' website, or the Telegraph's, and you'd think the nation has an IQ of 50. And these are people who read the papers!
Shocking
A variant of this tale flopped into my email inbox a few minutes ago. It made me laugh, but seems to have been doing the rounds (as it were) since 2004 — quite a long time in Interweb years, methinks.
Such stuff...
I must say, the world music, and the delicious jazz, on BBC Radio 3 on a wet, dark, Saturday afternoon while you're busy humping (see above) is pretty hard to beat. I must also say that getting "stuff"1 into or out of the loft was (by comparison) trivially easy when there were two or three of us. I find I'm taking a much harder line on what goes up there versus what is now destined for the tip. And tomorrow I shall be asking a certain young chap some pointed questions about "childish things". Does he really want to hang on to all the "Robotech" books, for example? The Lego? The Scaletrix? The endless array of material from "Games Workshop"?
Is it (gasp) time for a cuppa, yet? It must be — it's just coming to the end of Jazz record requests, and "Kind of Blue" from the sublime Miles.
Later, and yawning...
... I've now seen both these films, but have yet to hear the music of Ligeti Jr:
