2011 — 11 September: Sunday
Supping my morning cuppa1 I'm listening to Ian Hislop being given a chance to try new things, including his first-ever pair of jeans and Grand Theft Auto #4 ("Execrable"). I could do without the audience reactions.
And here's another young "old curmudgeon":
The curse of interesting times is upon us. A few decades ago it occurred to some boffins that it might be useful to connect their computers together and now we're having to reforge society from first principles. Our old media are going into toxic shock, our social interactions are changed forever, we seem to be simultaneously prey to the most intrusive kinds of corporate or governmental surveillance and the unfettered activity of hackers, fraudsters and terrorists, and a whole generation of internet-native children are growing up doubting the value of any form of organic interface. It wasn't like this with the fax machine.
I never did get the hang of that life-line to profit that was Christa's fax machine :-)
What some ex-Presidents get up to
Well, this one has been making himself particularly useful.
Though I now realise2 that the "guinea worm" he's been helping to eradicate is a completely different nasty critter (with a similar name and a similar propensity for attacking us from the inside, as it were) from the New Guinea tapeworm that (at one time) was ending up in the digestive tracts of gefilte fish eaters in New York. Still, it's well on track to be the second disease eradicated in human history.
I swear there are much scarier little nasties here on Planet Earth than any of the BEMs I've seen described in SF. Would that other more recent English-speaking ex-Presidents and ex-Prime Ministers were making themselves as genuinely useful, rather than just sniping at one another. Sometimes while making personal fortunes on the lecture circuit. (Though why anyone in her right mind would wish to pay to listen to these bozos baffles me.)
Another new saying...
... (to me, certainly) to chew over with my tasty, nice and quick to prepare, lunch of chicken, ham and apricot pie, micro-chips3 and peas, followed by a fresh pear from my garden: "You will not be punished for your anger. You will be punished by your anger." Chap named Buddha came up with that, apparently. I suspect it's true as anger has always struck me as incredibly self-destructive. Almost as corrosive as guilt.
Having broken my...
... self-imposed no-TV zone by setting the Freesat PVR to watch/record a new bio4 of Jane Austen with the divine "Duckface" as both narrator and presenter (whatever that means) while I was out being unwined and dined, les enfants have just (21:00) set off back for their London flat. The Android Tablet PC was inspected and approved. I handed over the disgraced 160GB iPod (though I suspect the basic problem lay with iTunes rather than the dinky device itself), and a loan-only Folio Society edition of Boswell's "London Journal" for the more literate of the pair. I shall decline to identify which one that is.