2010 — 11 December: Saturday
Although I woke much earlier this morning1 I decided "the heck with this" and basically caught myself another hour or so in the Land of Nod, until it was time for my regular dose of Brian Matthew — he has already revealed that the song "Little Sister" (that I know from Ry Cooder's 1979 digital album Bop till you drop) actually goes back at least as far as 1961.
I see the email spam robots are out in considerable force once again this morning. If every Googlemail user is similarly afflicted2 there must be many billions of these nasty bits sloshing noisomely to and fro. What a stupid waste of useful network bandwidth. <Sigh>
At IBM, inside their firewall, there were a couple of incidents. I was once sent a job application with a virus infecting the attached CV. Since the applicant was arrogantly rude about the impossibility of this being the case when I mildly pointed out his problem and offered him a chance to clean up his act, I will now admit that I didn't bother to forward his application to the "Personnel" people. And the chap in charge of allocating elderly PCs for use as primitive home terminals in the early 1990s found new employment (I believe, as a handyman) fairly soon after allocating a virus to a batch of them :-)
Time for a bit of breakfast and another cuppa. It's a balmy +1C out there, but has now clouded over and is distinctly grey. The barometer remains very high. Roll on Spring, heh?
I hesitate to assume...
... that everything I read in "Private Eye" is 100% true. However, this Croation update on Gustave Courbet's 1866 painting L'Origine de Monde seems to be. Source and snippet:
Artist Jiri Boudnik has cracked philosophy's big question of where we come from — by painting his national flag on women's crotches... Now Jiri has returned to the Czech capital Prague to perform his one man art show where he painted the Czech flag on his models while listening to patriotic music played by a string quartet.
Priceless.
I can see (more) clearly now...
... after a swift fresh-air trot down to my local optician. The "intermediate" strength single-vision pair (for use at the PCs) had already arrived, as had a new pair of Polaroid clip-ons. That was quick. I shall see (ha ha) how I get on before I make a final decision about a third pair just for reading books. I feel as if I'm now awash with glasses. Plus, they're not particularly cheap these days. But vision is beyond price.
Time (11:53) for lemonses, I think. I also have a glimmer of a chance for a proper fresh air walk tomorrow.
Thanks, Mr Postie
Phone and council stuff for dear Mama, the entirely stupid offer of a BT credit card for her, and the following DVD of a film Christa and I saw in the Harbour Lights cinema down in Ocean Village back in 1998:
A nicely-overblown bit of Southern Gothic... How about a spot of lunch, Mrs Landingham?
Time-warped visions of yesteryear
It's weird. The last time my vision was like this (crisp and clear close at hand, every screen pixel visible — a 1,920 x 1,200 24" display — everything beyond 30 cm or so a vast blur) was back when I was 12, before I got my first pair of glasses. Before high-resolution computer displays existed. The crucial difference now, of course,3 is that I've had a lifetime of corrected (20:30) clarity and have got rather used to it! Still, one change of glasses and normal distance crispness is restored and I'm once again safe to be out and about on the highways of the UK (but then, of course, I cannot focus on anything nearer than 70 cm or so. There's just no pleasing some people, is there?
Bearing in mind what I read here earlier today about Oliver Sacks' latest book, perhaps I should write my own? Dear Mama's also just had her eyesight assessed in the care-home, having point-blank refused to let Christa and me arrange a home visit to do just that in earlier times. She "would benefit from a new pair of bi-focals as her present ones" (begged, borrowed, or possibly even stolen, from her dead sister) "are completely the wrong prescription" and battered and scratched almost to opacity in any case. That will be £165 please, Mr Mounce.
Cheap at half the price, though whether she can now remember the start of a sentence in a book by the time she reaches the end of the same sentence is an entirely different matter. I'm afraid I've also been tracking a steady diminution of her range of spoken vocabulary; furthermore, trying (almost always unsuccessfully) to recall the word she wants (and, worse, still knows she wants) now takes long enough for her to forget what she actually wanted to say before she's finished saying it. This bemuses her, and she regularly concludes "I don't know what's the matter with me... I must be mad". Though whether, according to the rules of Catch-22, you can actually be mad if you recognise that you are, is also another matter. She remains remarkably calm about all this at the moment.
Let he that is Intelligently Designed explain and justify this inexorable and degrading mental dissolution. I'll be damned if I can.
Next time I look up...
... it's 22:16 and I feel somewhat in favour of an earlyish night. I've been feeding myself, reading, listening to music, pottering around, doing the dishes, and then re-watching "Eclipse" to make sure it was as good as I originally thought it was. It is. The new glasses seem to be working out pretty well, too.