2011 — 13 May: Friday
I spent yesterday evening interspersing concentrated bursts of Iain McGilchrist's fascinating neural hemisphere saga with pauses (to let my own hemispheres recover) of mindless DVD database and artwork sorting, all to the accompaniment of much fine music. Now that's what I call pottering.
This morning, the young gentleman pictured here1 emailed me a few minutes ago to tell me he and Peter's g/f are off to the Bahamas for a couple of weeks, with "wheels up" at 10:30 today. Young people, heh? Dashing around the planet like mad things, when they're not busy blowing themselves to bits like equally mad things.
Well it's a sunny morning (here, at least) for the pair of them. Hello, cuppa. Say "Hi" to my tum, why don't you? Meanwhile, I now have two weeks in which to arrange (at my leisure) to clear the rest of the garden debris before the next round of jungle clearances. Aah, the sweetness of prolonged procrastination.
While wandering between the shelves of Tesco's yesterday I explicitly rejected two items:
- The UK Blu-ray of "The King's Speech"
Close examination of the 'small print' confirms what Mike had already warned me — it has been mastered, for some reason, laziness? ignorance? both? as 1080i at 50Hz rather than 1080p at 24 frames — in other words, it's been speeded up by 4% and thus matches the frame rate of the standard definition PAL DVD. I shall therefore be ordering2 my copy from the States - The Passage
This is the fat book by Justin Cronin I mentioned here. Despite it now costing less than a fiver for the paperback, skimming random sections showed it to be badly-written, with an over-reliance on what the BBFC will, in due course — if and when Ridley Scott's film version arrives — describe as "strong language".
How about some breakfast? [Pause] It's nice enough out there, I think, for a day trip. Time I saw the sea again, methinks. [Pause] Quick whizz out to the petrol shop (my first-ever £40 top-up), grab a chicken sandwich in Waitrose, nip back home briefly and, away I go. It's 10:48 and very pleasant out there.
Home is the ...
... photographer, home from the sea, having caught inter alia a gosling or two in the little harbour at Keyhaven (gateway, as it were, to Hurst Castle). I see I made my first solo visit there a surprisingly long time ago, in February 2008. Here's one of the 101 photos I took today:
Bedraggled? Moi? Don't be rude.
It was perfect weather, I must say. And it makes a change from retail therapy :-)
In later news...
... and before the need for further sleep becomes overpowering, let me say I finally discovered how to persuade WinAmp to disgorge my complete MP3 collection as an HTML file that is relatively easy to work with. When I'd tried the same trick earlier with a copy of iTunes (that I'd temporarily loaded on to BlackBeast just for that purpose) I ended up with a huge XML file that was of little use to man nor beast. Watch a space near this.