2010 — 29 July: Thursday
Much as an elderly lady1 fiddles with, and thereby triggers, an alarm call pendant that had foolishly been hung around her neck, so a slightly less elderly chap fiddles with the red button on his Humax Freesat PVR (not that it PVRs any more as the original remote control is kaput) and finds that, simply by plugging in a spare Ethernet cable, the whole experimental world of the BBC iPlayer Beta is suddenly open to him.
It's now 00:55 or so, but (having first tried and, after 25 minutes, ejected,2 that other "Boleyn" girl) I spent some of the evening watching bits of "Sherlock" on the 60" plasma. I can't pretend the quality of the streamed replay is anywhere near the original hi-def transmission I watched last Sunday, but it was watchable, and the sound was good. No signs of stuttering or buffering, either... The remainder of the evening was consumed by phone calls and email, though I did manage to squeeze in a toast to my now-distant Big Bro on his 24-hour way back to NZ. Rather him than me.
Next task: some sleep. G'night.
Awake again
First two cuppas down, nearly ready for breakfast. Time (08:57) in fact to get dressed and then ponder the best point at which to prepare my next tasty crockpot. It's sunny with some clouds knocking around — a perfect description of my Life.
For example, I shall be regaining the use of my newly-vinyl-floored study after next Friday (not tomorrow) and then have only Peter's new carpet to contend with. Sun. For anyone unlucky enough to face a complete central heating system replacement that includes underfloor pipework, Mounce's new Law suggests allow up to 25% of the budget for new floor coverings and other decorating costs. Clouds. I predict a large number of mobile cartons of books in my future after that. Mixed weather. Heck, I may even be able to unearth and reclaim that buried artefact my dining table at some point before the end of this year. Sun. That would be handy, and merely involves first losing about a cubic metre of German-language material. Clouds.
These are all background issues, however, while I oversee dear Mama's relocation3 to (and I very much hope calm acceptance of) the care-home that will (realistically) now become her final home. At least she's going to be much easier to visit from now on, though whether she will continue to recognise me for much longer is a whole different question. (And after the money runs out, perhaps I can sell her for medical experiments? Smile, Lis, that's what we writer chappies call a joke! Even Christa could manage those — vivid proof.)
Artistic focus
Amazing.
At the Last Supper, the Bible tells us, Christ announced to his disciples, "One of you will betray me." According to a recent report in the International Journal of
Obesity,4 he might have added, "And you will all grow fatter and fatter."
The authors of the study, Brian Wansink and his brother, Craig Wansink, analyzed 52 depictions of the Last Supper — from a sixth-century mosaic to a 1996 photograph by Renee Cox in
which the nude artist sits in for Christ — and concluded that the food portions became increasingly generous over time, with the main dish expanding by 69%, the bread portions by 23%,
and the plates swelling in size by 66%.
Should I skip breakfast? [Pause] I see a German hero of Christa has just died — a co-founder of "Aldi". (Source.)
I haven't been in that chain since Christa's death, though I did continue to use rivals "Lidl" for a while, when I was still addicted to all those well-fired loaves from the "Sainsbury's" near them in Eastleigh. In fact, it's been quite some time since I even went into Eastleigh — my last visit was over six months ago when I went to see Avatar in 3D. My, Time flies!
As do I. A quick bite to eat, a swig of the juice that refreshes, and I'm off out in search of the mythical affordable high-quality bookcase. Legend has it they are not quite extinct hereabouts but I may be a while, Captain Scott... :-)
Later that day...
Suddenly, it's 16:50 and molecules wandering away from my crockpot are making my mouth water. I must say, these are good times to be an online lurker, it seems. Personally, I very much align myself with Ben Goldacre (and, indeed, I mentioned him just a week ago while getting side-tracked by some Gillian McKeith piffle about chlorophyll). However, I'd managed to miss the delicious spat on Twitter (not being "down wiv the yoof" enough to be a Tweeter). Said spat was about Dr Goldacre being called a liar (sweet!) by a tweet that seems to have originated from non-Dr McKeith's account, but which has later undergone a degree (no pun intended) of attempted trail-concealment and what I suppose we could try to call "spin-non-doctoring". And that wonderful Jack Of Kent covers the story gloriously well here.
Even better, reading comments around this story (on the BBC by Bill Thompson, for example, and on Dr G's own site) has given me to understand that the fragrant Ms McKeith is also known as the "poo lady". I even went to said Lady's own web site, but won't waste HTML code on offering a link, to help deny it what even the sainted ex-PM Mrs T would (being a "proper" chemist) never have called "the chlorophyll of publicity".
But best of all, I found some very promising affordable high-quality bookcases in Staples — the first place I looked, in fact. I then trudged through Ikea more out of a sense of duty. Yes, they have some too. And, keeping in mind those 178 cartons of offsite books looming (currently no bigger than a man's hand) on the horizon, I limited myself to just one, remaindered, book, but grabbed myself a corker that had already made me chortle several times... always a good sign, I find. I shall have to filch at least the story of the TV-watching piranha fish in an office.
NPR's "Fresh Air" is covering the New Yorker piece by Atul Gawande that I mentioned yesterday. "What should medicine do when it can't save your life?" It was an easier listen than I expected. He sounds like a decent chap, too. Most tellingly, his exposure to the palliative care professionals (the ones I met here in the UK were saints, I tell you) that I gather U.S. surgeons don't get to meet that often has also led directly to his having some of the "hard discussions"5 within his own family, not just with his patients. Physician, heal thyself indeed — until you can't.