2010 — 30 March: Tuesday
I've finished "Cetaganda", it's 01:06, so I guess it's time for sleep. And it seems to have stopped raining...
G'night.
Mirabile dictu
It's still not raining at 10:09 though the clouds are giving Mr Sun a hard time and the ground looks damper than moist out there. Still, the wake-me-up cuppa is onboard, the wake-the-brain-up Su Doku is solved, and breakfast beckons. Meanwhile, I've never seen "psychobabble" so beautifully described as here by one of my favourite gadflies:
Self-esteem is, of course, a term in the modern lexicon of psychobabble, and psychobabble is itself the verbal expression of self-absorption without self-examination. The former is a pleasurable vice,1 the latter a painful discipline. An accomplished psychobabbler can talk for hours about himself without revealing anything.
While stumbling around in the mess that is the saga of Texas rewriting its history books (come back, Molly Ivins, we need you) I found this pleasant glade.
Does anyone still have any sympathy of any sort for bankers? Grrr. I've banked with both these sets of bozos over the years, and given up on both of them quite some time ago.
This brilliant Steve Bell cartoon completely restored my good humour! And, if it hadn't, spotting this in tonight's BBC4 lineup would have — for me, at any rate.
Still a result!
Recall, if you care to, the nice set of John Lewis Beech bookshelves that I diddled Christa out of three years ago. Well, they were a damned sight easier to get upstairs into my study with her help than they just have been to relocate downstairs in the living room without2 her help. Not only do I now need a fresh shirt before inflicting myself on anyone else's society, but it's 13:23 and I also need more calories. And a cuppa. 'Twas ever thus.
Just listened to an NPR item on Capgras patients. It also featured the fairly recent Reith lecturer, VS Ramachandran. What goes on, or stops going on, in our heads is very very spooky stuff! Right. Time for that food. It's now 14:02 and, although still raining, does seem to be a bit brighter out there. I'm no brighter in here, of course. A lot dustier, in fact.
Actually, with the tall bookcase shifted downstairs, it is brighter in here, too. Although there's still no doubt at all in my mind that books do furnish a room, you need a pretty big room to get away with having books in the middle rather than up against the walls. Christa was right, as usual. Still, part of this exercise is about getting books out of Brian-the-plumber's way and part is about persuading myself that a goodly number — three? four? thousand or so — now need to find new homes to clutter up. A more than three-pipe problem, particularly for a non-smoker. Good job I'm retired, heh? :-)
Patching broken systems
I wonder if the 435.2MB "update" to OS X now downloading into my iMac will fix the problem that irritatingly stopped me copying files from one of my XP machines? Or was I merely bamboozled by the effect of the Jobs reality distortion field? Meanwhile, the guvmint is today promising to ease my passage into the next world (or oblivion, of course) via long-term residential care. Shoot me now, someone! And it's raining again... Time (17:13) for my next cuppa.
Tut, tut, Mr ex-senior IBM crook. You greedy little man. (Source.)