2009 — 27 November: Friday
Later today I have my final lunch date for the week in "Bean Below" in Twyford. Meanwhile, while finally relocating and replumbing the HP MPC and testing it (having first moved the printer to make room for it) I've been catching up with a couple of "Late Junction" programmes. Hard to believe this excellent series has been running for a decade. I don't know most of the music that's played during a typical programme; nor do I know most of the players; but I find I generally like nearly all of it. Definitely worth the licence fee.
Sleep is starting to beckon ever more urgently, so I don't think I'll be making much headway with the new Gyles Brandreth diaries tonight, no matter how sensational they are. Revisit here the four "eyes" that he asserts make for the best political diaries.
G'night.
Another sunny start...
... another failure to put out the black bin for monthly glass collection. But my accumulated silica barely covers the bottom of said bin in several months. I must have been cutting down on my marmaladic input. It's 08:55 and the burst of Terry Riley on BBC Radio 3 was just dismissed by one listener as "political" music. Using a lot of repeated notes to say nothing...
Just in time for breakfast:
"It's a no-brainer to choose the chocolate chip cookie with crickets (or as entomophagists call them, "chocolate chirp" cookies) over any other brand!" Erm, gimme a moment here.
This piece of writing made me smile more than the comments it gathered (for once). Snippet and source:
Every time you type the words "what is Twilight?" or "why is the Guardian writing about this?", not only does a fairy die, but a little more definition finds its way to Taylor Lautner's hairless lycan abs, and will continue do so [sic] until his rectus abdominis stands out in such shocking relief that the mere sight of it or any of its attendant muscles will prevent anything about war, pestilence, famine, death or the truth about 9/11 ever being covered again in this newspaper — and indeed any other.
Given the latest in a long series of revelations about covered-up Catholic priestly fiddlings, it's a bit rich to find the Vatican dismissing the Twilight saga as a "deviant moral vacuum". Presumably I'm missing something here.
Under the weather...
... it hasn't taken long for the sunshine to turn into rain. It's cold out there, too. I don't think I'll be suggesting to Iris that we walk. Just read an interview with the woman with the gorgeous voice from the Cocteau Twins, preceded by tales of domestic horror from the childhood of actor Patrick Stewart. I think I shall give up news for a decade or so...
On with the show. Or, to put it another way, out into the cold and the rain to say "Hi" to Iris... It's 11:35 and counting. The "Bean Below" had better be a tasty venue.
It was!
One tasty snack and gentle gossip-fest later, and I'm now back at the ranch in comfortable time to enjoy Bartok's beautiful "Concerto for Orchestra" in its entirety. I'm (22 minutes in) just at that delicious 'underwater' bit that always reminds me of a sequence from the original Thunderball film — no-one could accuse me of an excess of poetry in my soul, alas. Hearing it on my nice big PC speakers1 is just bonus. My ex-ICL pal John Smythson introduced me to this piece some 30-plus years ago and it remains high on my favourites list. My first version was on vinyl (of course) with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Solti.
My ex-IBM pal Iris is in fine form, I'm delighted to report. I owe her some book and film recommendations as she's too lazy to read my diary :-) (Don't worry — she won't see this!)
Black Friday
I am no wiser, but considerably better-informed, after skimming this. I was idly wondering why several commercial emails coming in today all referred to "Black Friday" sales. Ignorance is generally blissful.
Speaking of which, Firefox and/or my Thunderbird email client seem to have occasional problems with unusual characters in URLs, particularly when I insert a "link" into an email. The "%28" and "%29" character codes for open and close parentheses seem to survive, but not so the "%7e" of a tilde character. Though there's just a trace of a hint of a suspicion that it could be a Lotus Notes rich text field issue. (Not that "Notes" isn't perfect, bug-free, and incapable of improvement,2 of course.)
To my shame...
... although I've enjoyed Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary" since 1971 that, and a small anthology of his sardonic humour, are all I know him for. So this has piqued my interest. Perhaps I'll pop it into my virtual shopping basket, but first there's the overdue issue of an evening meal. It's 18:28 and, for some strange reason, I seem to be starving.