2011 — 30 March: Wednesday

A good night's sleep¹ does a lot to compensate for the dull, grey morning. But step back with me now to mid-1974 for one of my very earliest photos of Christa (several months before she changed her surname, let alone the registration of her vehicle). We'd gone for an early evening stroll in Windsor Great Park and were just about to set off to inspect the statue of the giant horse:

Her happy smile² remained basically unaltered for the next 33 years. I regard this as one of my better achievements :-)

It's 09:13 and time for breakfast and another cuppa.

Fighting sparks with sparks?

Rather intriguing. (Link.)

All shook up

There's a mostly interesting set of mini-essays here. Part of this one made me smile:

I'm with the Black Swan avoidance camp here. As a member of Neurotics Anonymous, I'd say: Let's not compare nuclear deaths (so far) to coal deaths (so far), let's instead invest in solar and tidal power and use the ample existing technologies for energy conservation. Of course, one way to conserve energy is to stay off airplanes (even to take pleasant vacations in Australia). Which has the incidental benefit of a (very slight) reduction in your odds of being eaten by a shark.

Douglas Kenrick in The Edge

Sadly, not an osprey...

... to be seen, so (it being then too early to call in at Lillie Langtrey's tea-rooms in Stockbridge) we pushed on through to one of our trusty fallback options — the Hill Top café a few miles short of Salisbury. The weather remained pretty awful; a premature April shower, perhaps?

Now (13:51) I'm back in time to have missed Mr Postie by a couple of hours. He apparently has a couple of packages for me that were too large to be pushed through the letter box. So, a cuppa (thirst things first) and I shall be on my way out again, briefly. I suspect a DVD or two. Not that I ever buy any online... perish the thought.

The Kids are all right
I've been waiting for this since Amazon suggested it to me last October
Masters of science fiction
Season #1 of a US TV show for £3-99!
Leap Year
A promising debut, did well at Cannes

It's nice to have my full left-hand turning circle back again without the awesome scraping sounds.

What? Me, worry?

A phrase that will be MADdeningly familiar to some people. I finally did the "empathy" test I spotted on Sunday... and managed a not terribly impressive 24 points out of 80. Oops.

Time (19:55) for some evening entertainment, methinks. [Pause] Lisa Cholodenko's film is well-nigh perfect, so Amazon's "suggestion" was spot-on. It's the sort of film that can almost restore my faith in Hollywood. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are two of my favourite actresses.

Munch on this!

Those zany South Tynesiders and their knitting needles...

Footnotes

¹ Apparently dreamless and untroubled.
² Memory suggests she may even have been concealing one of her horrible cigarettes behind her back. I gently but firmly managed to get her to stop smoking by a line of persuasion that went something along the lines of "I won't marry a smoker." In later years she said she was glad I'd taken that line, though she found it quite a struggle at first. (And, actually, I would have married her regardless. I would have been an even bigger idiot than I normally am not to have.)