2011 — 1 July: Friday: rabbits!
Some aspects of yesterday evening came to an abrupt end while the Lads from the 'Lectric1 did whatever it was they had to do to find, diagnose, and fix whatever had gone castors-up so that they could then restore power to the rest of the 'Gardens' — a process that began by switching off the supply to those of us who still had one when they arrived.
It's now 04:51 and power is back on. I shall return to bed shortly after my round of switching on and resetting various bits of kit.
Probably needless to say, once you're awake there's not much point in going back to bed. So I've been browsing through a pile of long-neglected "Guardian" arts supplements (many containing Posy Simmonds pieces that I intend to harvest). This "radio review" made me laugh aloud:
Anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher this week ended her four-part study of Love (World Service). In sober, unflappable tones, she has spoken
calmly about the emotional tangles that make smiling goons and wailing wrecks of the rest of us... [She] has such a hypnotically omnipotent and stern way
of delivering these observations that it leaves you nodding obediently at the radio. She comes up with a dauntingly mammoth list of things that will keep
you happy long term with your partner (these include shared beliefs and traditions, family ties, an ability to compromise, a sense of humour and a sense of
responsibility, hard work and good luck), and then adds what sounds so commonsensical a coda:
"You really do have to start with the right person."
Thank you, Dr F, I did exactly that. Although I missed this series, I have no doubt this is the same lady who wrote "Anatomy of Love" back in 1992...
... The "Literary Review" described her as "a Desmond Morris for the boudoir". I enjoyed her book at the time. But then I quite enjoyed Desmond Morris two decades earlier, too.
It's quite fascinating to see which of the "flavour of the week" items are still extant up to a decade later. Most disappear without trace despite all the PR hype. Still, I've just ordered a copy of a non-Culture Iain M Banks book ("The Algebraist") that I enjoyed reading an extract from (despite my reservations) and a 2004 Spike Lee film "She hate me" that I was unaware of. Fingers crossed.
It's 07:07 — time for a cuppa.
Come back, Funes!
Well, reading this piece (comments 'n all) suggests I'm not wasting my time. But I just forgot what I wanted to say :-)
(Funes was the chap in the Borges short story who "saw that by the time he died he would still not have finished classifying all the memories of his childhood".)
And, given that Posy Simmonds published this "Literary Life" extract seven years ago almost to the day I think she was bang on target:
For many years...
... my New York friend Carol kept me topped up with the "New Yorker" while I responded with the "Guardian Weekly". I suspect I got the better deal. Here's a nice piece on dating from the former. I know exactly what he means. Source and snippet:
For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T.G.I. Friday's, in a shopping center on Route 1 in New Jersey. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. We've been together for twenty-three years. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other.
Time for breakfast. It's 09:54 and looking pleasantly sunny out there.
For want of a comma
A little while ago, I was taken (mildly — and incorrectly, in my opinion) to task over my use of "dominatrix". In his email the guilty party also informed me that it was Kissinger who'd remarked that "academic politics is so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small". Funnily enough, a different correspondent just pointed me to the piece here about the loss of the "Oxford comma" which en passant gives it as Sayre's Law. Doubtless some one of my scholarly crew will enlighten me in due course. (More here.)
I have it in mind that a missing hyphen (or minus sign?) in a piece of NASA rocket control code was the planet's most costly punctuation error, causing the need to abort a satellite launch after lift-off. Who knows in what memory crevice that fact has been lodged (for many years).
Who said...
... size isn't everything? Not these splendid chaps!
I bought my first edition on the day I watched "Alien" in the cinema in Staines in October 1979. And the second edition (at 3x the price) in Soton in April 1993. I didn't take note of when I bought the CD-ROM edition from Grolier, but it must have been shortly after Win95 came out.
Recall the book I mentioned here? On the back cover is a warning about the danger of life-long addiction to SF. I bought it in 1963...
It's now 19:12 and the evening lies ahead, as it were. After the dishes.