2010 — 14 January: Thursday
Junior rang a couple of hours ago — he's still enjoying his new workplace, though the current travel conditions are a tad irksome. And I've just noticed it's managed to creep past midnight again. I see the latest forecast is now for rain and fog. I think I prefer either or both those to snow and ice. Bring it on, Gaia, bring it on! Janice Long has just been raving about the new Clive Owen film (The Boys are back), music mostly by Sigur Ros. Can't say it sounds a barrel of laughs, but that could be because I too am an unwilling widower1 :-)
Mind you, it also sounds somewhat like Martian Child with John Cusack, and I ended up enjoying that.
G'night. At — yawn — 01:03 or thereabouts.
Here comes the sun?
Well, not quite. But it is +1C and quite a lot of the grotty once-white stuff has packed its tent and slunk away. Why, we even had a visit from some of the bin men about an hour ago, though my spy tells me there was more shifting around than actual emptying.2 It's 09:43 and, as soon as Lord Melvyn has finished his chattering (next week: the Glencoe massacre!) I shall slurp the rest of my cuppa and start stuffing the crockpot.
Stuffed it was, by 10:50. Meanwhile the outside world wags on at +2C — cool, but almost balmy without any nasty wind. Second cuppa is brewing. I must say, the combination of Antonia Fraser's reading from her memoir of Pinter, the interview on "Woman's Hour" with the widow of a bomb-disposal commando, and the slicing and dicing of an onion or two, jolly nearly combined to disturb my usual equanimity for a few moments. Right. What's next, Mrs Landingham? Breakfast, perhaps?
Remember Hill Street Blues? Well, there's a real-life radio equivalent. It's an audio blog from the Tulsa police and it's absolutely gripping, but with extra hilarity thrown in. (Lots more here.) Here's my favourite snippet, from just over five minutes in. It's a certainty for "Pick of the Week" in my opinion:
So he's standing behind the glass screen door, trying to act tough. He's trying to taunt us, as if he's untouchable and as if there's no way we can get him. However, there was
a way. A very unexpected one. A short, frail, elderly woman shuffles across the living room floor behind him in a housedress and slippers. She raises her hand, swings it back, and
knocks the kid upside the back of his head.
"You not knowin' right from wrong with the sense God gave a loaf o' bread, ignorant fool boy? Open the dang door. Show some respec' for the po-lice!" she yells to her grandson.
It was one of the best parental admonitions that I've heard in a very long time.
Grandma scoots to the doorway. She shoves the kid to the side and opens the door for us. The kid's face turns pale. His shoulders slump as the superpowers of the magical glass wondershield
disappear. Without a door in between us, the kid's "Kiss my ass" vernacular turned into "Yes, sir. Sir. Yes, sir." And, as it turns out, he has warrants, too. And, lo and behold. He had not
just one, but three bags of weed in his pockets.
I'm not sure if there's much of a moral to this story, except this. I would proudly wear a T-shirt with a picture of little old lady smacking a kid upside the head, with the words "I love
Grandma" written in big letters across it.
Zinsser strikes again
He wrote a book called "On writing well" that I finally read back in 1994. Here, he's picked out a lovely 44-word autobiographical sentence (from Thoreau's Walden):
So what? Well, if you click the pic, he also amusingly shows how today's bureaucrats and leaders might well recast the original. I think back, rather wryly, to my earliest days in the "Pubs" department of IBM Hursley. My relatively informal, generally active, writing style was quickly dubbed "the new informality" by one of the editors. My colleagues were encouraged to adopt it. Some were less keen than others to do so. Interesting times.
Frank Drake (again)
I mentioned this chap some months back. Here's a brilliant application of his equation to that elusive quest for love in the UK. It could have come straight from a script of The Big Bang Theory (pun unintentional).
Rumble, rumble. Time (14:06) to do something about lunch.3
Local MPs step into the mire...
... that is the IBM pension scheme changes. Thanks for the link, Brian. Fascinating. It's a 35-minute video clip. Over 800 UK IBMers are leaving (well, forced out, to be brutal about it) while Uncle Sam (Palmisano) has just seen his US pension rise from $20,000,000 to $40,000,000 — there's a foul stench wafting around. It looks as if there is a loophole that, in essence, permits "redundancy by stealth" with — if you please — the payments being loaded onto the pension fund. Now, there's a surprise.
"Work and Pensions Minister Angela Eagle said the issue remained a matter for IBM, but added that she was sympathetic to members of the firm's pension scheme. Ms Eagle said she hoped IBM's board would take note of the anger and worry the decision had caused many of its employees". Whew! Glad that's all sorted out, then.
I also cleared off most of the remaining ice from the drive. It really is jolly good exercise, no matter how futile. But that makes all the more necessary the next cuppa. It's 16:20 already. How does that happen?
Also in the mire
My friend's elderly mama (a year or so more ancient, even, than my own) is currently in hospital surrounded, if you please, by a trauma team. You hafta wonder what it's all about. Where's the German locum with the overdose of diamorphine when you need him? "DNR" is not just the acronym for dynamic noise reduction (an offshoot of an ancient Philips technology [DNL] that I can't have thought about for three decades or more). Old age has very little to recommend it. Old age combined with frailty and poor health has absolutely nothing going for it. Except that trauma team...
It's 19:01 and I have an enticing crockpot to investigate.
Later
I suspect only BBC4 could follow a programme about the maths of chaos with one about cage fighting women. My friend Carol, by the way, once did some programming for Benoit Mandelbrot. I doubt she's done any cage fighting!