2010 — 16 January: Saturday
Well, the forecast for today (when I last checked just before midnight) was for intermittent heavy rain. Beats snow and ice in my book. It's about +4C out there at the moment, and the last few icebergs are fading away. The current non-weather forecast for Sunday, by the way, is a walk somewhere — anywhere, frankly. ("We gotta get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do...")
No walk and all play makes Jack a dull boy. G'night.
Having sunk...
... my second cuppa1 of the morning while emailing a couple of chums and listening to "Sounds of the 60" (it must be Saturday) I can report that the BBC's weather forecast was bang on target. Poor ol' Sylvester's little legs were spinning around like the clappers. It's 09:31 and I suppose I'd better grab some breakfast.
The latest debit card is activated (new number, new layout, new logo, new name, meaningless list of "improvements"). Lenny Henry has just finished instructing the nation in the use of Samuel Beckett. Recognising the non-sense of Life, heh? I'm digesting breakfast and musing at the quantity of heavy drizzle out there. It's currently dark enough to need a light on.
Banking on it
How about the non-sense of financiers' "wisdom"?
But the bankers' testimony showed a stunning failure, even now, to grasp the nature and extent of the current crisis. And that's important: It tells us that as Congress and the
administration try to reform the financial system, they should ignore advice coming from the supposed wise men of Wall Street, who have no wisdom to offer.
Still, Mr. Dimon's cluelessness paled beside that of Goldman Sachs's Lloyd Blankfein, who compared the financial crisis to a hurricane nobody could have predicted. Phil Angelides, the
commission's chairman, was not amused: The financial crisis, he declared, wasn't an act of God; it resulted from "acts of men and women."
Elsewhere:
Blankfein, who is described by a rival, Morgan Stanley's boss John Mack, as "smart, really engaged, funny and quick — very quick", has been tone deaf to the public mood, bizarrely telling the Sunday Times recently that his merry band of bankers were carrying out "God's work" (a "joke", his PR man later assured the financial media).
Which God would that be, I wonder? More here, if you've the stomach for it. And don't overlook the story of their tiny bonus pot three months ago. Enough is evidently not as good as a feast. (The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself — JK Galbraith.)
Better have another cuppa! Still, at least the rain has stopped. It's 11:54 and BBC Radio 3 is very soothing. Plus loads of vintage ads to admire here.
Why I avoid a lot of smart modern software... dept.
I occasionally have reasons for some of my Luddite propensities. Consider this tale of woe:
I recall similar problems (on a much smaller scale) when I moved over to, and a month or so later, back from, Linux during a temporary loss of vigour on the part of one of my XP systems. Code pages and character sets, heh? It brings back very distant memories of the eternal struggle within ICL to sort out the pound, dollar, and hash symbols across a range of screens and printers. And that was in the mid 1970s.
Mind you, I was browsing Eric Raymond's dictionary of hacker jargon within the last week or so2 only to see, (with IE8, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox on my XP system) exactly similar symptoms that are ascribed, by Mr Raymond, (on this test page) to bugs in my browser. Sadly, however, I see much the same symptoms with Firefox on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10 box, and with both Firefox and Safari on my OS X Snow Leopard iMac so I'm beginning to suspect a vast conspiracy...
Time for lunch. It's 14:00 already — somehow.
A plagiarism on all your houses...
... as Mrs Malaprop might have said. Over lunch yesterday Len told me he'd seen a suggestion that the storyline — such as it is — of James Cameron's film Avatar can be mapped neatly on to the storyline — such as it is — of Disney's Pocahontas. He sent me a link to a piece of artwork by one Matt Bateman illustrating this proposition. Now, I'm at a disadvantage here, as I've seen neither of these cinematic masterpieces. However, I was able to suggest that Poul Anderson's 1957 short story Call me Joe also sounds like a cousin of Cameron's epic. That august organ Wikipedia lends its credibility to my suggestion.
A post-Christmas puzzler
I know where I found this picture...
... but I wonder how difficult it would be to track down.
The heaviness of the current burst of rain (at 19:53) belies its description on the BBC's site as a "light shower". So I'm predicting mud a'plenty in the vicinity of Farley Mount tomorrow for our walk. But we need the fresh air, the exercise, and a chance to clear the lungs. Also, having now heard five episodes of the "Pallisers" I've decided to re-read the entire saga. There's too much missing from the dramatisation.
What goes around...
I must say, back in September 1980 when I was watching a fascinating BBC Horizon programme called Invasion of the Virions on a 13" portable Sony colour TV perched on top of a large studio monitor loudspeaker I didn't think that in 30 years I'd be watching (on a 60" plasma high-definition screen, yet) what was essentially an equally fascinating update, including details of the construction of a synthetic virus from mail-order chemicals. Amazing.