2010 — 1 August: Sunday — rabbits (again)!
Suddenly, it's after midnight1 and I think there's just time to do the dishes before I fall asleep. Despite having regained full control of the Humax satellite PVR it's been an almost exclusively radio-based day. No matter. G'night. [Pause] Well, after re-installing Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 now that the CD version has arrived. It's quite incredible to see just how far this lovely piece of software has evolved since its earliest days as "Artworks" on the Acorn RISC OS platform.
At 00:47, g'night, take 2.
Sunshine and showers?
The BBC Radio 3 newsreader has just made a joke about assuming the forecaster meant heavy showers rather than heavy sunshine. Still, I don't suppose anyone was listening. And I'm still going out for a walk in just under two hours — though not without a cuppa on board.
Left on the designated...
... shelf, in the ditto shelf room? I find this little essay both painful and very funny, but choose not to identify which bits are which. Source and snippet:
On the print media front I had about 100ft of fiction, much of it unread; 18ft of poetry, which improves my soul; 6ft of books about stone circles; 12ft of folklore, religion and the occult, and 3ft of the forgotten Welsh mystic Arthur Machen. I've got 10ft of inky specialist music fanzines from the 80s and 90s Bucketful of Brains and No Depression that I needed for journalistic fact checking before Wikipedia. And I'm dragging probably 70ft of comics, which I am now saving for my son, who will come to despise them, and me for loving them.
And all this stuff, in the digital age, is literally worthless financially, and losing any value it had daily. There's nothing here a burglar2 would even bother with...
The equally interesting story here, however, inevitably reminds me of a wonderful Charles Addams cartoon in which almost an entire cinema audience is collectively flooding the place while sole exception Uncle Fester is (of course) laughing maniacally. Given the list of films mentioned, I think I'm largely with Fester.
Boys and their toys
Having mentioned the insane Trident missile system3 just yesterday, consider this bit of economic rationality from the current issue of "Private Eye" magazine:
Back...
... from a humid (shirt-destroying) 6.5 mile stroll starting from Shawford and returning home in good time for a bite to eat and to catch the BBC telling me all about the rather amazing music of A.R. Rahman — a chap who's somehow remained off my radar screen. (Though I now learn I already knew some of his music from the Jodie Foster film "Inside Man" and the Nic Cage film "Lord of War". I have no particular wish to see "Slumdog millionaire" though several of my chums have recommended it.)
I now have to make do more locally with the much less pleasant music of a neighbour's power tools as he once again labours mightily in his garage. (Almost as annoyingly as his kids were a few years ago when they kept skateboarding their mindless way up and down my local bit of pavement for hours on end as it seemed the ability to leap over the edge without killing themselves was apparently vital to their social success within their equally mindless peer group.)
Teenagers are evidently an alien life-form.
It seems "294" may be...
... a better answer for my long, thin study than "42". I've a feeling I shall be spending some time at this site in the next week or so (when not visiting dear Mama, of course)...
Listening again to Elbow's CD "The Seldom Seen Kid", with its explicit and deliberate use of a wide dynamic range, sent me once again to the TurnMeUp folk, to see what's new on that front and, from there, once again to "The Loudness War Analyzed" article, at which you can see a couple of interesting lists contrasting the noisy chaps and the quieter ones. My own tastes largely align with the chaps on the "quieter" list, as it happens, despite my occasional turning up of the volume control to "11". There's another set of like-minded folk here, too.
Next thing I know...
... it's 21:09 and the kids have recently set off back to London after very nicely treating the Aged P (erm, that would be me) to a meal in Soton — I drove for a change as their car was stuffed to the not-very-capacious gills with camping gear — and then indulging said Aged P by allowing him (me) to play them some snippets from various classical music CDs on the latest sound system. Peter wants me to get on with ripping my classical CDs, of course, though I actually have far more such music on tape than I do on CD.
Now I think the next sensible item of business will be a cuppa, followed by episode #2 of "Sherlock" on the BBC's hi-def channel. [Pause] Not as good as last week's episode, alas.