2011 — 15 May: Sunday
A gloriously, sunny start to the day as 07:00 disappears quietly into the relatively recent past. Guess, by the way, who made the colourful "blanket" (square by square) for the sofabed supporting Junior here, back in our Old Windsor days:
Hello cuppa... how are you?1
That delicious book I read recently is now coming out in paperback. Hence a silly interview that made me smile. Source and sexual snippet suitable for any Sinday:
Catholics have more extreme sex lives because they're taught that pleasure is bad for you. Who thinks it's normal to kneel down to a naked man who's nailed to a cross? It's like a bad leather bar
Could do better
I was musing recently, not so much on the inherent insanity of employee performance appraisal, as on the unnatural acts forced upon, and all too often performed by, the hapless managers caught up in the bean-counter-controlled2 mindset and environment. Consider, if you will, Einstein's performance evaluation for 1905. (Link.)
It's 08:49 so I shall now see if I can't throw together a packed lunch and depart on time for our planned walk. Shouldn't be too difficult.
Read on, MacDuff...
I've reached the next major section (Chapter 3: Language, truth and music) in one of my current books:
Music and language have a shared architecture, built out of intonational phrases related by a kind of 'syntax', although the syntax of music has more to
do with the overall shape of the whole piece over many minutes (or, in the case of Wagner,31 hours) than with the specific relationship of
rapidly successive elements in a linear progression.
-------------
31 These long, long musical 'sentences' of Wagner's are, however, paralleled in language by the extraordinarily long sentences of his
admirer, Thomas Mann, in which one has to keep subjects and subordinate clauses in mind for minutes at a
time, while one waits for the verb, or for the
principal clause to conclude.
Back, in time to...
... catch most of an amazing Bob Marley acoustic set that (I blush to confess) I initially thought was Seu Jorge. This, after a grand little 7-mile hike, followed by some interesting experiments in extracting an MP3 file from an audio CD that turned out to be a multi-session CD-ROM. (It's the "bonus" 16th track on this month's free CD from "The Word" magazine — an entertaining 20-minute chat about who was the most impressive rock star the assembled folk had met or interviewed.)
The track plays perfectly fine on my NAD CD player; I simply wanted to add it to my existing collection of podcasts from that excellent magazine.
Mike also very kindly gave me access to a small set of Regina programs he's written that he uses to process some structured text files into HTML files. I can see my homework project for several evenings to come. I last used Rexx (Mike Cowlishaw's IBM precursor) over 20 years ago :-)
It's 15:49 and has now clouded over considerably. Time for another cuppa, methinks.
You talkin' to me?
Mike has an eye for the ladies (assuming this fine specimen is a lady). There's always one, isn't there?
And here's the start of my very own local opium den, perhaps. Click the pic for a bigger image:
