2010 — 29 May: Saturday
After I got back from tea and half a Danish with Roger and Eileen, I waded into the crockpot, chilled down the surplus, did the dishes, and resumed my semi-frantic attempts to get the house into a state where my plumber can get to work. Then, almost before I know it, that ol' midnight came a-knockin' just as it seems to every 24 hours or so.
I'd had to give up on BBC Radio 2's Friday night arts show with the ever-enthusiastic Claudia Winkleman earlier in the evening, not because of her (I find her enthusiasm oddly engaging) but because — lacking any form of tone controls or audio filters anywhere in my audio amplification chain — I was unable to get rid of the heavy bass rumbles present on both the satellite and terrestrial digital transmissions.1 No other channel is afflicted in this way, but (since my FM tuner packed up quite some time ago after 28 years or so) I've simply reverted to a variety of CDs to have some reliable music filling the house, at quite a respectable volume, while I work.
"Work?" Well, yes, stuff-sorting and carton-stuffing continues unabated and certainly counts as work in my opinion. Maybe I should hire myself out as a packer, after all? Mind you, I continue to be both delighted and bemused at some of the things I've been turning up.
Random example before I pack it away and call it a night (click the text [which is from Art Spiegelman's introduction] to see the front cover):
(Probably) needless to say, I'm a huge fan of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" too! G'night (yawn) at 00:52 or so.
The morning drizzle will, I hope, ...
... rinse this sort of stuff out of the air. It looks good, though, doesn't it? (Gallery here.)
I wonder what Buckminster Fuller would have had to say about Nature's appropriation of "his" geodesic dome design?
It's 11:01 and on BBC Radio 3 they're actually discussing stuff like traffic noise on acoustic recordings, and the simulation of various environments (such as Haydn's study). Hah! On with the cartonic stuffing. [Pause] But only after sending Amazon another chunk of my pension for this Naxos "Virtual Haydn" (complete works for solo keyboard, Tom Beghin, seven historical keyboards, nine digitally sampled and re-created virtual rooms including the man's own study) on four Blu-rays... Less than £30, I mean, come on, who could resist that? <Sigh>
Isn't it amazing...
... what you can find tucked down the back of an old filing cabinet?
Judging by some of the other items in its geological layer, I first typeset this in the mid-1980s. Can't say I still need it though :-)
What I do need is a more substantial lunch than the snack with which I staved off a few pangs an hour or more ago. It's 13:52 and the rain seems to have run out, as it were. Nearly time, therefore, for the first warehouse trip of the day. [Pause] Yep, there are now exactly 100 cartons tucked safely away and I have another 19 back here at the ranch to help keep me out of mischief for the rest of this Bank Holiday weekend. Back just in time for World Routes, which has kicked off with some nice flamenco. Grand stuff. What's next, Mrs Landingham? A cuppa? Fabulous wheeze.
From the personal to...
... the political. The Guardian invited its readers to comment on the dissolute dissolution Honours List I described only yesterday as "emetic". I was doing fine with this one by "shimrod"...
... until I bumped up against the nasty crack about "typical British-German dysfunctional family". I resent that! :-)
Later
This is simultaneously repellent and fascinating. Our species is quite something.
Sadly, when my lovely old Acorn StrongARM RISC PC went to the great bit bucket in the sky2 I lost one of my nicer fonts: American typewriter. I've never bought a replacement because a) I somehow resented paying PC-level prices for the True Type equivalent after having enjoyed high-quality scaleable anti-aliased font technology for over a decade on the Acorn platform,3 and b) I got so comfortable back in the world of markup languages (but this time for the Web, instead of tedious IBM technical manuals) that I largely left DTP behind...
Anyway, here's a little something I just found that I'd originally typeset as a bumper sticker for my friend Kate when she had cats:
I used American typewriter, of course, to mimic the original "I heart NY" stickers. (I did typeset another one — "I club my kid" — but Christa [correctly] ruled that one out of order on the grounds of bad taste.)