2011 — 23 April: Saturday
A sunny start and, unusually for "Sounds of the 60s", a track from the Who's rock opera "Tommy".1 That, and a nice cuppa, will do nicely for the time being.
The time being 08:34, give or take.
It's been a while...
... since I mentioned the kitchen sink philosophy I espouse. I've just spent a couple of minutes chiselling congealed egg yolk from one of my stainless steel egg cups. It clings nearly as tenaciously as the Thiokol I once dealt with. Whether this was because the egg in question was already some five weeks past its "Use by" date is just one of Life's little impossible questions, rather like the one dodged by the Pope. (Link.)
Whatever happened to the doctrine of infallibility?
Stands to reason?
I had a one-year subscription to "Mother Jones" magazine back in the early 1980s. Copies didn't always arrive, but when they did the articles were usually (like the curate's egg) good in parts. There's a link in this one by Chris Mooney to an equally interesting essay by Antonio Damasio that appeared in "Scientific American" in October 1994. Source and snippet:
Although the towering nuclear threat of four decades ago has assumed a less dramatic posture, it is apparent to all but the most absent-minded optimists that other clear and present dangers confront us. The world population is still exploding; air, water and food are still being polluted; ethical and educational standards are still declining; violence and drug addiction are still rising. Many specific causes are at work behind all these developments, but through all of them runs the irrationality of human behavior, spreading like an epidemic, and not less threatening to our future than was the prospect of nuclear holocaust when [William] Faulkner was moved to speak.
I guess my next mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find where my copy of his 1999 book "The feeling of what happens" is currently lurking on my shelves. Aah, the thrill of the chase. This could take a while.
Having finished preparing...
... my next evening meal to the excellent music of "Snakefarm" (who seem only to have released one CD — "Songs from My Funeral") I'm now relaxing with a late lemonses cuppa and noting that it's taken Mr Barclays (home insurance division) about three weeks to notice that dear Mama's insurance premiums have now ceased. My theory that stopping all her direct debits would (a bit brutal, I agree) be the most efficient way of flushing all her various business contacts out of the woodwork is panning out nicely so far.
Mr Postie also dropped off three DVDs:
- 9
Sounds like a rag-doll version of Terminator - Born in 68
A long look at post-1968 France (directed by the chaps who made Cockles and Muscles). I first watched it with Mike a year ago - The Quiet
I've enjoyed various other TV items directed by Jamie Babbit
Tinkering with my scanner...
... I was gobsmacked a few minutes ago by what a good job it's done in turning a three-page, decade-old PC magazine article (that I'd cut out and tucked away) into a not over-large PDF file. Thus inspired, I've been working my way through some of the fascinating PDF manipulation tools linked from here. I admit I didn't know PDF is a Federal Info Processing Standard though I certainly do know that Adobe Acrobat is way beyond my computing budget, and I also recall very rarely enjoying the tussles I had with the full Acrobat product suite back when IBM was paying me to use it (from time to time).
I also like what I've seen of the Open Source DTP program Scribus. But then I've been tinkering with DTP on and off since 1985.