2011 — 23 July: Saturday
Tentatively-made plans for a local stroll are currently on hold1 while I slowly finish the process of waking up.
Now, I like a good pun as much (indeed, possibly more) than the next chap, but consider the following:
In the age of Viagra, most folks look at what used to be called "impotence" — now retooled as "erectile dysfunction" — and figure, "bad problem, good solution." Even Osama bin Laden — rechristened "Mr. Softee" by the New York Post — agreed. And in an era when publishers of academic philosophy pump out an anthology of footnoted essays on any cultural spasm that excites the public for more than eight seconds, it was only a matter of time before scholars would bone-up on modern pharmaceutical culture and give us The Philosophy of Viagra: Bioethical Responses to the Viagrification of the Modern World, edited by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Rodopi).
Not every essay in the volume equals the high standard of clarity set by the editor and, to take just two examples — Bourgault and O'Mathuna. There may be a pill that helps one understand French scholar Claude-Raphaël Samama's "Desire and Its Mysteries: Erectile Stimulators Between Thighs and Selves," but I didn't have it. So I'm not sure if I agree that "A mass of abounding and infinitely variegated imaginary reconstructions, cultural functions, or simply, individual idiosyncrasies have been added to the dimension of the Eros and its potentially transgressive energy."
What a fine, upstanding start to the day. How about a bracing cuppa, Mrs Landingham? I shall soon be walking in the sunshine that seems to be flying in the face of the BBC's pessimistic forecast. [Pause] The gods of rain had obviously been appeased elsewhere. And I got home (much faster than the hapless hordes trapped in slow-moving hell on the south-bound motorway) to find my new graphics card waiting for me on the front doorstep. Excellent. A new toy to play with. Or should I make some lunch first? Decisions, decisions.
I can see clearly now...
After a painless initial installation, followed by a minor niggle (over [I gather] the Visual C++ distributable from Microsoft) during the inevitable subsequent ritual dance of the updating of the drivers, the new 1GB Sapphire Radeon HD5670 is sitting there (having replaced the baby HD4350 I bought with the BlackBeast barebones bundle) equally quietly2 doing its graphics DirectX 11 thing:
Somewhat to my surprise the new "weakest link" in my basic system is now the supposedly-speedy WD Velociraptor system hard drive. It may spin at 10,000 rpm but that's evidently not enough to impress the "Windows Experience" team. Even more to my surprise ('cos I checked the performance stats of both the previous card and the graphics integrated on the motherboard before I fitted the new toy) it turned out that the basic "score" of the integrated graphics (4.4) exceeds that of the earlier card (3.7).
It's a good job that card only cost me about £27. I intend to fit it into my second Linux PC — the HP MPC that IBM so kindly subsidised for me in October 2006 just before I disappeared off their radar screen into the chaff of much-needed (and appreciated) pre-retirement vacation — to see if I can't coax Ubuntu's new "Unity" interface to come out of hiding for longer than a second or so. With an Intel Core2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM there really shouldn't be a problem!
It's 15:13 and quite cloudy, but still not raining. This week's edition of "World Routes" is coming from Sri Lanka. I haven't knowingly spoken to anybody from that country since my apprentice days in Hatfield back in 1972.
Mild blast...
... from the recent past. The second volume of Chris Mullin's diaries3 contains an interesting snippet — Omnipage 18 OCR to the rescue:
The News of the World has been caught out paying huge sums of money to people whose phones it has been tapping, in return for their silence. An old story, but the suspicion is that it is the tip of a very large iceberg. What really gives it legs is that the editor who presided when the scandal was first exposed was none other than Andy Coulson, David Cameron's chief spin doctor. Much happiness on our side. A rare chance to inflict a blow on both Murdoch and the Tories. The latter looked very sheepish when the subject came up at Question time. Their spokesman, an unhappy-looking Chris Grayling, quietly conceded that there were 'questions to be answered', provoking howls of ridicule from our side. An unexpected bonus, fun while it lasts, but I doubt it will make much difference in the long run.
How cool is that? It's 20:06 and time for another cuppa.