2010 — 26 August: Thursday

Well, I don't understand how it can be Thursday already.1 Next thing we know, it's going to be what always used to be called "August Bank Holiday", followed by the Indian summer, the cool mornings, the mists, the frost, and — bang! — the awful paroxysm of Christmas. Shoot me now,2 please...

Still, young Miss Staples today agreed to ship three new bookcases to me, from which I can extract just the three side-panels I need to assemble my remaining bookcases. Then all I have to do is tell her to come and pickup the packages. Pretty good customer service, I thought. Let's just hope none of the replacement packages delivered next Wednesday also has a broken right hand side panel, otherwise this could run and run...

G'night.

I got so angry...

... listening to a brainwashed young woman on BBC Radio 4 describing her appalling life in a polygamous ex-Mormonic (shouldn't that be "moronic"?) household that I could no longer concentrate on my friend Ian's elegantly simple demolition job on the "unwashed socks" material he'd been reading on that ever-so-smart chap's web site (see yesterday), let alone give my full attention to the simple (but troublesome) message "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"3 that is currently making web browsing a miserable experience for my sister-in-law down in NZ. So, it's back to BBC Radio 3 and a second cuppa for me. It's 09:29 and grey and moist out there.

In a moment of weakness, I also upgraded to the very latest level of the O&O disc defragmentation software having been pestered politely for the last few years. It could just be wishful thinking, but my XP system seems quite sprightly this morning after several hours yesterday evening spent on moving millions and millions of bits around, as it were. I even did my first-ever boot-time consolidation on this machine since last re-installing XP on it over two years ago.

While on yesterday's great salt hunt at Hedge End I also mooched gently round the aisles of "PC World". The desktop PC is about to go on the endangered species list, I think.

What's next, Mrs Landingham?

Well, having once again noted Roger Rees in an episode of West Wing I decided to see if the 1982 RSC staging of Nicholas Nickleby is available on DVD.

DVD

[Pause] "Buy" has just been clicked. Let's see if I enjoy it as much as Christa and I did when Channel 4 first showed it. It's 11:17 and still not quite raining. Tea? Yes!

Speaking (again) of outliers. WEIRD people turn down free money. (Source.)

Look again at the XKCD cartoon to see where the sociologists and psychologists are.

Are you awake, son?

Having mentioned (shudder) Christmas, it occurs to me that my rich son may even now already be thinking "What can I get the ol' fella for Xmas?" Look no further:

Doonesbury

Currently on pre-order from Amazon in the U.S. — I don't know how Trudeau has maintained such a high standard for 40 years but (as it says) "The strip has angered, irritated, and rebuked every president since Nixon". And what's wrong with doing that?

Time (13:24) to do something about lunch. Now, how do I fire-up that over-complicated new grill again? Watch out for bangs as I agitate some bangers...

Light slowly dawns

Or not. What a bright future our crazy species has:

"Over the past three centuries, according to well-accepted studies from a range of sources, the world has spent about 0.72 percent of the world's per capita gross domestic product on artificial lighting. This is so for England in 1700, in the underdeveloped world not on the grid and in the developed world using the most advanced lighting technologies. There may be little reason to expect a different future response from our species."
In particular, Tsao expects that an ageing population will resort to brighter lighting as its eyesight deteriorates.

Lewis Page in The Register


Pass "Go", collect your...

... tea and a slice of cake in the care-home, have yet another circular rambling chat with dear Mama. Her memories of family and previous phases of existence are steadily fading away, but she remains basically calm. Her sentences are still grammatical; her vocabulary is still reasonable. But (for example) you can tell her her age three or four times in the course of a minute or so and she's still able to ask "How old am I?" (as opposed to "How old did you [just] say I was?") ten seconds later and evince precisely the same reaction each time. It's as if her short-term memory is on a tape loop that's now being continually erased. I have to wonder whether other functions, like the memory of how to breathe, and how to swallow, are going to erode in the same way.

We had the now usual "I'd like to go to sleep and not wake up" sentiments. In light of this however, and in the absence of a living will, I can and will do nothing. She's terminally ill only in the same sense that we all are, so "deep sedation" (lovely euphemism) is not an option on the table. The General Medical Council can advise until it's blue in the face, but a GP can have no meaningful discussion when the brain has atrophied beyond a certain point. And I doubt a Power of Attorney over her health and welfare will empower me in the way that she seems to want. More here:

Dignity

It's 17:34 and the mad people were all out in force on the motorway yet again. But the cuppa that soothes has soothed :-)

Six hours later... time for bed. G'night.

  

Footnotes

1  Just one item of many thousands that puzzle me.
2  A few hours ago I read a piece on the Telegraph web site about a woman mourning the loss of her husband. I actually think (or like to think I think) I'm doing a bit better than this poor lady, but my goodness... I know how she feels, and I still miss my Christa. <Sigh>
3  A mere 1,600,000 Google results, but the top one is also the most promising. Even if it was last reviewed on April Fool's Day.