2010 — 27 September: Monday

While I've started to enjoy the benefits of the first fully-functional central heating system this house has ever contained my chum Ian in NZ¹ is corralling his Spring lambs in atrocious weather:

... we still have Dave's (shredded) kite way way up in our 30m+ high Liriodendron tree despite 140kph gusting gales — yes 140kph. (Down in the Wairarapa, 150km to south, they recorded a gust over 200kph last week. Those equinoctial gales eh) Spring is here; 44 lambs a gambolling; blossom blowing everywhere; rest of New Zealand suffering snow, sleet, hail, rain, and more rain. Oh to be in Hawkes Bay when the oaks come into leaf.

Ian in an email

Next tasks include breakfast, some supplies shopping, whizzing a cheque over to the care-home (they undercharged by one day last month), putting up the shelving at the front of this room, and moving two of the liberated bookcases into what was Christa's study. I've also decided to quarantine all the various computery books into Peter's room to give me a fighting chance of finding them. It's 08:56 and looks very grey out there.

Phew! (Take 2)

The eight smaller shelves (80cm each) in the front of the living room are now also up, and populated...

... just in time for me to think about a short supplies run ahead of lunch. It's 12:23 and slightly brighter out there.

The little music player company that could

Recalling my little list here — it needs updating! Apple now occupies the #2 slot with a market value (whatever that's supposed to mean these days) of $267 billion. IBM? A mere $169.2 billion. (Source.)

Condition-dependent adaptive proclivities?

Shoot me now.

David Buss's team at the University of Texas at Austin reported that men, when looking for one-night stands, check out women's bodies. Or as they put it, "men, but not women, have a condition-dependent adaptive proclivity to prioritize facial cues in long-term mating contexts, but shift their priorities toward bodily cues in short-term mating contexts."
Like many results in evolutionary psychology, this may seem blindingly obvious...

Matt Ridley in The WSJ

Happily, I have zero experience in this arcane area :-)

Le Goût des Autres

I always get a kick out of these lists of banned and challenged books. I love even more the small-minded cretins who seek to impose their bigoted views (or, worse, abysmal literary taste) on others. But I do wonder about items like Winnie the Pooh (#22) appearing on the list. And what the hell's supposed to be wrong with Catch-22? (#15)

As for the idea that Stephenie Meyer's highly enjoyable "Twilight" series is sexually explicit²... gimme a break! They should maybe first take a look at the series by Charlaine Harris that Alan Ball's excellent "True Blood" HBO TV series has been based on. (Source.)

Thanks, Mr Postie

I've just retrieved this item from the Venetian blinds delivery system:

I greatly admire the gritty "noir" novels of Jim Thompson and film director Michael Winterbottom is a class act, too. This title (based on the 1952 novel) was previously filmed in 1976 with Stacy Keach (but, at £69-81, that import DVD is a bit too rich for me).

It's official: my love affair with Staples is now over — they've just sent yet another invoice, to which I've replied (in part):

You have sent me yet another invoice.
I ordered, and paid in full for, eight bookcases.
So far, you've only been able to supply a total of
six that weren't damaged.

I will not pay for damaged goods, ...

<Sigh>

As I was wheeling out...

... the 'black' bin for tomorrow's collection, I spotted this fat little Boris...

... on his web, slung — if you please — below my washing line in front of shed #1. In other news, the two spare bookcases are now both populated and repositioned in what was Christa's study. There's a third that will soon be behind my chair down here, but I'm taking a brief break from book-shifting. It's 18:39 and a cuppa has just paved the way for my evening meal.

Footnote

¹ I'm still trying to understand how he doesn't have to walk around on his head.
² One of my rarest books (#104 of the original 1,000) is The Private Case (1981) by Patrick J Kearney. It's an annotated bibliography of the 'private case' erotica collection in the British Museum library. In its excellent introduction by Gershon Legman (better known, perhaps, for his enormous collections of limericks and 'dirty' jokes) the telling point is made that: "over the years libraries' censorship has paradoxically... had the effect of preserving, in many cases, the very books that would otherwise have been destroyed... preserving one or two rare copies, though many — very many — disappear forever, most of their editions having either been enthusiastically read to death, or purposefully destroyed by agencies entirely outside the libraries' sphere of influence. It is therefore idle to poke the usual good-natured fun at the odd titles bestowed in some of the older libraries on their special sections in which banned or bannable books, mostly about sex, are locked away. For essentially, the libraries' effort is to protect the books for, and sometimes against the readers, and not to protect the readers from the books. This is a point not to be overlooked."