2010 — 19 February: Friday
Another batch of stewed plums is cooling ready for making the Oatibix sludge just a tiny bit more interesting in a few hours from now. It's 00:34 or so, and time for another batch of that sleep stuff even though Late Junction is being deliciously mellow right now.
All that Corporate share purchasing by IBM over the last decade (some $100,000,000,000 or so) seems to have had little overall effect judging by the graph you can see here. (I still keep an eye on this "union" site from time to time.)
G'night.
So, where's all that...
... rain, hail, and brimstone we were promised? It's 08:13 and a nice, sunny morning so far. I'll just have to settle for an indoor shower! [Pause] And a cuppa. Pity I snaffled the last croissant last night as I quite fancy one for breakfast...
I don't know who chooses the items deemed newsworthy for the national radio news on the "Home" service, but she needs to lighten up. Back to Radio 3 unless the "castaway" is remotely interesting. Since his second musical choice is by Rolf Harris, I'm off. I see there's an early outing for Barry McKenzie and his "aunt" (not yet a dame, Edna Everage) tonight. It's déjà vu all over again sometimes.
There's some delicious bitchiness on display here. And what's wrong with that? Source and snippets:
From Johnson we learned, for instance, that Ibsen sometimes got drunk and wrote suggestive letters to young women. Johnson concluded that a dozen people picked "at random" on the street
should be preferred to immoral intellectuals, which may include himself, inasmuch as his long-term mistress later denounced in public the long-married author for hypocrisy...
For Posner, intellectuals should stick to things they know, advice he flouted in his own book.
I had no idea...
... that negotiating the menu on a first date was so tricky. I do remember the first "food date" that Christa and I went on. It was in the "Cock Pit"1 (in Eton) and I was greatly impressed by her dexterity in handling snails in garlic, and polite but firm in my refusal to try one (then, or ever). She kept a little card from that restaurant in her various purses for the next quarter of a century, until it fell apart. I also remember she paid the bill, which I thought was great! I'm pretty sure she liked me :-)
Mr Self Storage has just called to wonder if I can set a date for my offsite book storing during the central heating upcoming upheavals. Nope, not yeti. (It's an abominable task/prospect.) [Pause] Having seen that I've made no use of the Council's green bag garden waste service for the last two years, that's another direct debit I can kill. (I've just killed the one for house and contents insurance that the b*****s didn't bother to remind me to renew last October. I'm now insured with those never knowingly undersold people instead. Sorry, Christa, but you already knew my opinion of your bank's efficiency!) Step by domestic step, heh?
Next item, Mrs Landingham? Lunch with Len? Great!
A timely reminder
You'll see what I mean, here. Ultra paradox: Marty McFly meets the Star Trek crew and both battle The Terminator. Yeah, right. There are more details of the drafting process here. The 20th century turns out to be overcrowded with time travellers.
Next item: pop over for a cuppa with Roger and Eileen. Sounds like a good plan. And, unless I was hallucinating earlier, it seems Australia is to get its first saint later this year. ("Sheila, perhaps?" suggested Len.) Somehow, this good lady's second miracle — the curing of an inoperable case of lung cancer in 1993, a mere 84 years after she'd popped her clogs — fails to convince me, but is good enough for the bloke in drag in the Vatican. Is it 1st April already?
Somewhat later
Back, in the near freezing +1C of a clear starry night, via Brian, and thus now clutching a borrowed Blu-ray having had a demo on the PlayStation 3 that has displaced his hacked XBox as a Media box.
Classic bumper sticker from Toksvig. Time for some more food, methinks. Here, puss, puss!