2011 — 26 February: Saturday
I've apparently repaid my sleep debt1 as my bleary eyes survey what seems to have been recent rain out in the not so blue yonder of my little housing estate.
Still no tea, but I've just read an interesting essay featuring Arundhati Roy — and learned a new "cuss-word". (Link.)
My "lemonses" snack...
... is yet another reminder that this is not the right time of year to be buying nectarines. They look good, they taste and smell OK, but their texture teeters on the brink of mushiness all too soon after you get them home. Meanwhile (at 12:32) the sky is a mixture of fluffy white clouds, quite dark grey ones, and...
... bits of blue.
The death of warblers
I'm no fan of opera2 (the music, not the web browser) but I found this BBC programme weirdly fascinating. People are strange.
It seems it really isn't really over until the fat lady croaks.
The blue skies...
... have now disappeared behind rain clouds and Mr Postie hasn't improved matters by delivering the latest invoice from dear Mama's care-home. It hits a new peak (hairdressing and annual increase both included this month). Good job it's only money. Still, he also dropped off a DVD of an excellent documentary film I first saw on Channel 4 back in 2005 or so. (Before that TV channel dumbed down, certainly.) If you click the pic...
... you should find a PDF file Study Guide to accompany it, too. Well worth a look. Its starting point is Eisenhower's farewell address on January 17th 1961. (Less than 18 months after I'd written to him, actually!)
There's not much to disagree with here, either. Source and snippet:
In a modern political sphere that has its fair share of narcissists and ignoramuses, no one is quite as narcissistic or as ignorant as the liberal interventionist. From the comfort of his Home Counties home, possibly to the sound of birds tweeting on the windowsill, the liberal interventionist will write furious, spittle-stained articles about the need to invade faraway countries in order to topple their dictators. As casually and thoughtlessly as the rest of us write shopping lists,3 he will pen a 10-point plan for the bombing of Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or Iraq and not give a second thought to the potentially disastrous consequences.
I got there from here. There's plenty more here, too. I found the implicit assumption on page 37 of this chilling document nearly caused my head to explode. In my ever-humble opinion, the only "safe, secure, and effective nuclear arsenal" is one that doesn't exist anywhere on the planet. Review Ron Cobb's excellent artwork here.
How's this for a...
... spot of literary one-upmanship? I found the comments (by an Amazon reviewer) after reading the piece here about Jacques Bonnet's book "Phantoms on the Bookshelves" dealing with the 40,000 or so that he keeps knocking about his apartment:
Bonnett quotes Pliny the Elder (via Alberto Manguel) to the effect that "it is very rare that a bad book does not contain some merit for a cultivated man". Actually this sounds more like Pliny the Younger to me, whose letter to Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 71 AD, records that he, the Younger, was deep in the histories of Livy at the time, and so chose not to accompany his uncle, the Elder, in the spot of natural history fieldwork which led to the latter's untimely death — a warning, if one was needed, of how right it is to prefer the library to a 'healthy exercise'.
Later
While I was re-watching "Why we fight"4 a walk tomorrow was first mooted, and then cancelled, in light of a changing weather forecast. The advantage of having the film on DVD, by the way, is that it also now includes an insightful and up-to-date audio commentary between Mr Jarecki and an articulate retired Colonel. It's 21:21 and, I fear, I've just let yet another cup of boiling water go stone cold around its tea bag, dammit!