2011 — 26 September: Monday

I was thinking, this morning,1 that while I'd introduced Christa to the music of Pink Floyd, she'd responded with Smetana. Not quite the same thing, is it? But I enjoyed hearing the "bit about the river" section of Ma Vlast a few minutes ago on BBC Radio 3. I didn't know until just now, however, that his first name was "Bedrich". Crikey.

It looks quite moist out there this autumn morning, though the sun is doing its best shiny thing. I have a supplies run to make if I don't want to starve. I could also do with some breakfast, sooner rather than later.

Greasy business

When a country is "allowed" to "default" on "almost half the debt it owes" where does it all go, I wonder? And who decides who gets what? What a strange system. I begin to think that the real mistake I've been making over the years has been always to pay my debts...

Some people worry...

... about even stranger things than I do :-)

... during an eclipse, the disc of the Moon almost exactly covers the disc of the Sun. In the past, the Moon would have looked much bigger and would have completely obscured the Sun during eclipses; in the future, the Moon will look much smaller from Earth and a ring of sunlight will be visible even during an eclipse. Nobody has been able to think of a reason why intelligent beings capable of noticing this oddity should have evolved on Earth just at the time that the coincidence was there to be noticed. It worries me, but most people seem to accept it as just one of those things.

John Gribbin in New Humanist


Maybe it's just one of those things? Still, to the speed of separation of North America from Europe (the same rate as human toenail growth) I can now add the rate at which the Moon is getting more distant (four cm per year, give or take).

On the other hand...

... this made me chortle a whole lot more than somewhat. Source and snippet:

For example, there was the guy who asked me out while I was an arbitrage clerk at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange... We dated. To get rid of him, I told him I was a lesbian and I only wanted to date him if there could be another woman there, too. That didn't just make him pursue me with more fervor. It made the whole trading floor pursue me. And I had no idea why.

Penelope Trunk in her blog


Am I hearing things?

Yes. The knock that means goodies to report from Mr Postie, but first this:

I've just found an open source tool for cutting hi-resolution lossless audio files to DVD (for playback on either of my Oppo decks, possibly on others). As high-resolution DVD-Audio, that is. In other words, up to 24-bit / 96KHz. If you feed it a wav or a flac, you get an audio DVD. Present it with a VIDEO_TS folder, and it will extract any unencrypted lpcm audio it finds. Cool. (Link.)

Finally, a minute...

Having grabbed lunch, I whizzed out to the care home to top up dear Mama's petty cash reserves and (it turned out) spend an hour or so soothing her frazzled nerves, explaining — to be strictly accurate, trying to explain — for about the 200th time2 that it's where she now lives, and, no, she doesn't need milk or bread in the house, and, no, she can't go home to her parents, and, no, John3 isn't now coming, but that Heather4 will see her in two days from now, and yes, I will be there.

I then needed to nip home and change my shirt before calling in on Roger & Eileen for the cuppas needed to soothe my own frazzled nerves. After that, finding that DVD Profiler has no knowledge of a 1959 BAFTA award winning film dealing with racial prejudice in the UK comes as light relief, trust me.

Incoming

Time (20:02) to curl up and wrap myself around a tasty chicken pasandra while watching Big Bang Season #4. Bliss!

  

Footnotes

1  It still happens, from time to time.
2  I'm estimating about four times per visit on average, and I've visited weekly for over a year now.
3  "Who?" "Your other son. My older brother" "Where does he live?" "New Zealand" "Where's that?"
4  "Who?" "Your youngest granddaughter. My youngest niece" "Have I ever met her? Where does she live?" "New Zealand" "Where's that?"