2011 — 28 May: Saturday
Had my son not telephoned1 I wouldn't now be sitting here, wide awake, and catching up on a podcast or two. There's not much point trying to sleep when you're wide awake, is there? Even in the middle of the night. <Sigh> :-)
After all, Peter has been interrupting my sleep for the past three decades. Why should he stop now? But he who has the stash of scanned slides can at least exact some gentle photographic revenge:
And so once again to bed, as Pepys might say. (Or, as Albert Camus' son muttered to his père on being sent early to bed for some minor infraction: "Good night, minor writer of no importance".)
Bring back 1821!
I could quickly get very used to this interesting appearance of the Grauniad's "front page". If nothing else, it demonstrates how much more visual media has become since then. Me, I like words.
Example: the demolition job carried out in the book review here. Source and snippet:
Ms. Mannes's neo-phrenology is in any case undermined when her mentor, Aniruddh Patel of San Diego's Neurosciences Institute, asserts in the book's introduction that music engages "everything above the neck." The brain areas activated when we listen to pleasurable music, we are told, are also activated by drugs or sex — but that fact merely confirms how uninformative much neuroscience is. Techniques that cannot distinguish between hearing an organ played and having one's organs played with tell us nothing about either.
R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron
Not the best news for a Saturday morning. It's 09:09 and seems greyer out there than a few minutes ago.
I intercepted...
... Mr Postie this morning, and will be enjoying a vintage SF movie festival. "Forbidden Planet" is an incredibly extras-packed cheap Blu-ray. I bought the classic "seven-pack" (a mere £7-29) as my way of encouraging studios to re-release such vintage material. "Coffee Date" I watched last week when I borrowed it from Mike. It's a nice little rom-com with a gay twist.
A gorgeous young actress playing a "fag hag" doesn't hurt, either.
Time to set another crockpot in motion, as it were. It's 10:48 with a mix of sunshine and heavy clouds.
Echoes of dear Mama's...
... former life in Wombourne continue to show up. I've just spent 30 minutes on the phone handling two of her utilities companies. The third I should be able to placate with a simple online payment transfer. So that's water, phone #1 (mysteriously, of #2) and gas hopefully dealt with for the last time. The noisome snailmail package contained letters dating from the first week in April, which doesn't thrill me with the timeliness of the Royal Mail redirecting service.
Still, the second Mr Postie of the day also handed over a small parcel from Amazon in the US. And its contents were far more interesting:
I'd been waiting for "Inside Job" to show up since mid-February, even though I know it will do my blood pressure no good at all. There's even a "Study Guide" available as a 12-page PDF file.
I'm hungry, Mrs Landingham. Is it time for lunch? It's already 13:53 after all.
Later
As I was processing the artwork for "Creature from the Black Lagoon" — I scan my DVD covers and resize the images to fit my HDTV as well as using them for the screensaver on my iMac — I remembered having noted the obituary of the chap who wore the rubber creature suit. (His name was Ben Chapman but he's absent from the artwork because the studio's publicity department2 didn't want cinema audiences to think the creature was just a chap in a suit.)
Roger Waters is the current castaway on Desert Island Discs. I must check what music he chose.