2010 — 10 February: Wednesday
I must say, I'm enjoying enormously the Century of Cinema series. But it's been a long day — I woke briefly at around 03:00 — so I'm calling it a night. After doing the dishes, of course. G'night, at 00:04 or so. Let's hope the snow stays away.
It did
But there's an incoming flurry of security patching to be done. I suppose we should all be grateful that the Malicious Software Removal Tool doesn't actually remove Windows itself. I do wonder — fleetingly — what ActiveX Killbits KB978262 are,1 but the download window doesn't allow its user the freedom to click on the little "plus" sign that might give me a hint now that the tortuous process is doing its download thing. Besides I've already patched my main machine, so it's too late.
It's 09:14, a chilly but sunny morning, and the first cuppa is at hand. Heck, I'm even dressed!
Having confirmed my other bit of security patching with Toyota on their UK web site last night, I now await the recall and stainless steel patching of (part of) my accelerator pedal. Such good fun. (If you read this, Junior, be aware that your Aygo is similarly [potentially] afflicted.) Right. Time for breakfast.
And Keith Tippett to look forward to next Saturday. Excellent. Who could forget the anarchic cacophany that was "Septober Energy"?
Ciliate sex?
I remember drawing a paramecium. But I don't recall the level of detail given here. Source and snippet:
In ciliate sex, two individuals arrive, and two individuals leave: no eggs are fertilized, no offspring are produced. But by the time the two individuals go their separate ways, a massive change will have come over both of them: they will both have acquired a new genetic identity.
Explain that, Intelligent Designers!
Gunpowder plot
I was, and remain, not a "TOG". But Libby Purves interviews the amiable Irishman in next week's Radio Times and there's a reader anecdote that made me chortle:
Christa bought me some on a trip to London several years ago — after we'd tried it, the packet malingered on in a kitchen cupboard, but went the way of all flesh during her final kitchen tidy-up in 2007.
It's nearly noon. The bits of sky between the clouds are blue, but there's a cold wind blowing little bits of ice around. Tomorrow's walk feels as if it will be a cold one. If not a tribal enemy of the Quileute.
Somewhat later, and having been reading2 today's delivery...
... while awaiting a flying visit from Mike, I've just demolished a new culinary mini-masterpiece: smoked trout, chips and peas. Delicious, and full of the Omega 3 thingies. According to the label. Topped off with a (rare) coffee. I'm doing OK, Christa! I'm doing OK.
Almost on a par with...
... the religious problem posed by Adam's bellybutton. Source and snippet:
I'm not the only author I know who obsessively checks her Amazon rankings. It's not that I have any real idea what they mean: how they translate into how many books have sold or what kind of royalties I can expect. Nevertheless, I compare my numbers with those of my friends and enemies, charting the ups and downs and drinking accordingly...
There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, that made the rounds when I was a teenager about how an overzealous art director airbrushed out the bellybutton of a Playboy centerfold. I know how that playmate must have felt. A girl gets used to her buttons.
I missed this lovely piece by Clive James in praise of scepticism, too. (Source.)
It's dark, it's cold, and...
... it's nearly time for some more food. 18:14 already.
[Pause] Now it's 20:17 or so. Guess who's been catching up on those recent "off-kilter" documentary portraits of Scotland?
Yet there are here [in Aberdeen] areas that retain the integrity and character of villages. Why though should we treat this as a virtue, and seek to preserve, let alone emulate, the bucolic horror, the numbing boredom, the prying intimacy, the enforced matiness, the illiterate poverty, the silage stench, and the bestiality workshops which characterise village life? Real villages are why we live in cities.
Christa was more familiar with village life than I was with the UK equivalent. (Now that I come to think of it, when my parents lived for a year in Meldreth in 1971 that wasn't exactly characterised by urban liveliness,3 though I was a daily commuter down to Hatfield Poly and back.) Certainly, her neighbouring village of Callbach4 — a mere hop and a skip down the road from Meisenheim — struck me as pretty bucolic. She told me on our very first trip there (in 1974) that the local name for the area would translate as "beyond the back of the moon".
It should be worth catching Horizon purely for the pleasure of watching Steven Berkoff getting himself into infinite knots. [Pause] Nope. Almost depressingly low information content. <Sigh>
This was much better! (Thanks, Ian.)