2010 — 21 July: Wednesday
It's been nearly two months since I've watched a film quite as gripping and intriguing as I've just found "Michael Clayton" to be, and (before I know it) another midnight has thus gone whooshing by. Now I gather some heavy rain is forecast, but there's no sign of it so far (at 01:21). I've closed the skylight just in case. And I shall have to do some supplies shopping tomorrow regardless. Can't have Big Bro going hungry on his return.1
I think my next film from among relatively few recent arrivals...
... will be "The Other Boleyn Girl". But not tonight, Josephine. G'night.
When did the verb "soars"...
... change its meaning? I must have missed that memo. Source and snippet:
HIV rate 'soars' among over-50s
The over 50s infection rate in England, Wales and Northern Ireland more than doubled in under a decade — from 299 new cases2 in 2000 to 710
in 2007.
Well, at least the verb only occurs in the eye-catching headline, and not in the text of the story. I thought I'd check to see if Dr Ben Goldacre had spotted this, but got deliciously side-tracked. So here's another source and snippet:
['Dr' Gillian McKeith] talks endlessly about chlorophyll, for example: how it's "high in oxygen" and will "oxygenate your blood" — but chlorophyll will only make oxygen in the presence of light. It's dark in your intestines, and even if you stuck a searchlight up your bum to prove a point, you probably wouldn't absorb much oxygen in there, because you don't have gills in your gut. In fact, neither do fish. In fact, forgive me, but I don't think you really want oxygen up there, because methane fart gas mixed with oxygen is a potentially explosive combination.
The goat that reeks on yonder hill
Has fed all day on chlorophyll!
It's 09:35, I've breakfasted and shall catch my next cuppa while looking for signs of all that torrential rain we were promised overnight.
Verbal restraint
This lady reliably makes me smile. Her opening paragraph today made me laugh. Here's a snippet from further into her piece:
I have — as a person interested in words — been informed of the BBC's graded list of Words That Will Get Us All Fired. You'll be relieved to know that orgasm isn't listed and perhaps surprised to learn that what I will voluntarily choose to call the C-word is only in second place. The very worst thing to say is currently a term implying that a person and his mother are involved in relations frowned upon by conventional society and forcing any subsequent offspring to search card shops for the Happy Father's Day To My Loving Brother options. Obviously, the Beeb interviews a lot more 1970s pimps than I had hitherto realised.
There's much to divert me here, too.
Supplies shopped...
... and the latest miniature ERNIE paid in, it's the work of a mere 30 seconds or so to dismiss the crappy "comedy" from BBC R4 and revert to the tunes that soothe. There's a nice mixture of sun and cloud out there currently. Time to zap my neglected cuppa and have a lemonses break, listening to Tom Hollander (I haven't caught "Rev" but had it recommended just a few minutes ago).
Is the game a-foot?
Though I'd hesitate to admit it in public, I have a sneaking admiration for my friend Brian's literary taste. And, as I mentioned here, I equipped myself with a boxed set of the "canon" for retirement purposes. Reading Steven Moffat's piece in the new "Radio Times" almost inspires me to get started. The "fabulous Baker Street boys" is a great headline.3 Not so sure about "persevered"...
Time for a bite of lunch, methinks. And, while letting the salad lose some of its low temperature, why not hook the iMac's audio output back up with an analogue cable to the front of the living room while awaiting delivery of a suitable length of optical fibre? No reason I can think of, certainly. So all is iTunes MP3 bliss4 once again whenever the radio should happen to irritate me too much.
Visual feasts
I tracked these down a mere five days ago...
... and here's Mr Amazon's Home Delivery Network tapping at my door. Lacking artistic ability myself doesn't stop me recognising it in others. Graphical information design (whether as a map or an illustration) is right up there with good font design in my opinion. Mr "Strange Maps" has just moved his blog here. Mr Beautiful Info is still here. And if I get bored with either of these, I can fall back (as it were) into the safe arms of the new "Private Eye". Ain't Life grand?
I really wish...
... our one-time monopoly UK telecomms provider (with whom I've had a landline for the last 36 years) would stop cold-calling me in the evenings to try to get me to change to their broadband. Why would I wish to degrade my service? I find it quite effective to repeat, calmly, the question "What are you selling me?" until they deviate from their silly script to answer. Sometimes (to alleviate the boredom) I vary this by asking "Are you selling me something?" so that, when they say "No," I can warn them that I shall enter a formal complaint against them should they be foolish enough to have lied to me. I find these conversations are usually pleasantly short. I've yet to try Jerry Seinfeld's slightly more brutal approach.
It's 20:41 and a very pleasant evening of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Oh, and the two books were excellent, though I got more out of the Maps one.
Yawn. It's 22:55 and since I may face a drive up to the Midlands, I'm off for a sleep topup before Big Bro gets back here. G'night.