2011 — 8 March: Tuesday

Gloriously sunny though the weather looks like turning out to be1 I've only recently woken and — from the feel of it — the alien lifeforms invading my throat will be best confined to quarters for the next couple of days. I shall be testing that guff about whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And drinking lots of hot tea.

It's just an excuse, as a chum once confessed several years ago, to watch old films in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Christa's college chum Ute over in the Canaries just sent me an example of British humour... a cartoon showing a chap marooned on a desert island. He's managed to spell out the word "HELP" in stones on the beach. Overhead a plane is flying around trailing a banner that reads "SAY PLEASE".

It's 09:10 and I already need my next cuppa. Please, Mrs Landingham! :-)

The extent of my ignorance...

... knows few bounds these days. For example, I had no idea that "fonts" could get involved in the convoluted "discussion" of "immoral acts" on clear display in this piece. Source and snippet:

First Font - The intention is to use certain types of acts as foreplay, for the purpose of preparing for an act of natural marital relations. The intended end is good: natural marital relations open to life.

Second Font - The Magisterium teaches that, in order to be moral, a sexual act must be marital and unitive and procreative. The marital, unitive, and procreative meanings are the three interrelated good moral objects of any moral sexual act.

Third Font - Sometimes this question is posed with a description of some dire (or supposedly dire) circumstance, such that the spouses would supposedly be unable to achieve natural marital relations without unnatural sexual acts as foreplay, or the wife would be unable to achieve sexual climax without unnatural sexual acts before, during, or after natural marital relations.

Ronald Conte Jr in improperium Christi


I bet the author isn't kindly disposed toward anything any of my gay chums (of any sex) get up to. I shall never be able to look a Times Roman bold(ly) in the face again! Still, that delicious "before, during, or after" (besides — as it were — covering all bases) irresistibly reminds me of a piece in the advice column of the Irish Sunday Press many years ago:

Thank you for your enquiry. These refer to four separate stages in the consummation and thus the validity of a marriage. If any one of erectio, introductio, penetratio or ejaculatio is absent, the marriage is not properly consummated and thus not valid. Nor is it valid if they happen in the wrong order.


Phew! Glad we got that properly sorted. Now, tell me again how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Then it will be time for some breakfast.

A cure?

I'd not heard of Oscillococcinum. (Link.) Amusingly more here too.

It's been far too nice...

... to stay indoors, so I didn't. I nipped out for a spot of retail therapy (see below) treating myself to the remake of "Edge of Darkness", mostly out of curiosity to see what Martin Campbell has managed to do when revisiting his marvellous Troy Kennedy Martin story quarter of a century after making the superb BBC thriller with Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley. Michael Moore's "Sicko" was even cheaper, but is a film I missed on its first release...

BD and DVD

When I were nobbut...

... a lad, about the only saving grace to being off sick from school with (for example) measles was that Dad would unfailingly bring me a new comic to read every evening.

On much the same reward/therapy principle, I'm now (16:13) after a quick trip down to the End of the Hedge followed by a delicious tuna salad lunch and yet another polite but firm refusal to answer some stupid cold-call phone survey from the Indian continent (addressed [if that's possible] to Christa) sitting here supping my latest soothing cuppa while bathing in glorious stereo digital Gotan Project sound from BlackBeast. This is courtesy of the just-fitted Creative Blaster X-Fi Titanium (don't ask; I didn't) PCI Express sound card and its all-important SP/DIF I/O capability.2 Mind you, I first had to download and update over 200MB of software for it, and then make it the default sound playback device to persuade any sound out of it...

This concludes part one of my next cunning plan. Part two will consist of (finding and) placing my spare Sony Minidisc recorder under the Dell monitor within (as it were) striking distance of BlackBeast and hooking up its optical digital output to the new card's digital input.

Part three is where things may get a bit trickier. It will consist of working slowly but steadily through my vast stash of MD recordings (the spoken word ones to start with) to see what, if anything, is worth transcribing on to the PC as mp3 files. This could take a while, but may well turn out to be the easiest way of working out what I've got in the "archives".

I am still considering my options for part four, too. This is the choice of the precise process to use when turning the incoming digital audio signal into an mp3. I suspect that particular nut has been cracked more than once, if my reading of the "Audacity" information is any guide :-)

It's a good (un)job I'm retired. [Pause] Is now a good time to admit that the date on my wristwatch was reading "5" rather than "8" until mere seconds ago? Wonder when I last checked that? It's time (18:23) for my next nutritious blast of crockpot. If that doesn't chase away the virions, I don't know what will :-)

  

Footnotes

1  Though still slightly below freezing on my ice-coated car, evidently.
2  My web-based "research" last night revealed a relative lack of cards with digital input as well as output, and rather a lot of reports about poor, or even non-existent, support under 64-bit Windows 7.