2011 — 3 October: Monday
If I can believe BBC 6Music1 on this nice, sunny morning, our revered young Prime Minister — the boy Cameron, no less — has had to apologise fairly abjectly for coming across as Benny Hill. I somehow managed to miss this metamorphosis.
Wild Thing
I've long thought Maurice Sendak an admirable chap. Here's a new interview with him. Source and (opening) snippet:
Sendak has lived here for 40 years — until recently with his partner Eugene, who died in 2007; and now alone with his dog, Herman (after Melville), a large alsatian who barges to the door to greet us. "He's
German," says Sendak, getting up from the table where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle of a monster from his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. Sotto voce, he adds: "He doesn't know I'm Jewish."
At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape.
Breakfast is definitely now overdue.
Just back...
... from a quick there-and-back mercy-mission trip taking Mike to Gecko to pick up a replacement projector bulb to restore his equanimity. The poor chap discovered he cannot survive any longer on the tiny 52" picture of that Samsung LCD TV we'd inspected down in Millbrook a while back. (Over four years ago? Blimey.)
Just back...
... from a quick there-and-back mercy-mission trip to Asda to pick up a "Sit Right" to help me tackle the lower back pains that have been an unpleasant feature of my life from time to time, and which were recently exacerbated by lugging my heavy green leather swivel armchair upstairs into the reading room. Next task: a fresh cuppa. It's been another glorious day and is now 16:27. Time (as Steve Miller reminded us) keeps on slipping into the future.
[Pause]
My evening meal can now peacefully digest as I rejoin the citizens of "Cicely, Alaska" midway though Season #3. Yes, Mrs Landingham, I've done the dishes...
As you'd see...
... if you look closely enough at the second picture here, I bought the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as soon as it was published, in October 1979. Followed, naturally, by the second edition2 in 1993, and the CD-ROM variant a couple of years later. The upcoming 3rd edition is soon going to be online, and free, and an initial 3.2 million words or so. Details here.
Notice has been served...
... and I have just over a week to return Junior's room to a semi-habitable state for a weekend-of-my-birthday visit. There's the question of disposing of his existing bed and wardrobe, not to mention a bunch of storage cartons crammed to the gills (as it were) with stuff from what was Christa's study.
Perhaps I'll just emigrate instead :-)