2011 — 24 November: Thursday
Rather nasty-looking grey clouds scudding around out there but the cuppa (as ever) is nice and hot, as indeed are the radiators.1 I'm picking up Len in time for a lunch rendezvous with a couple of cubicle wage slaves from an earlier phase of our existence. I'm sure there are things to be done ahead of that, if only I could remember what they are.
Slightly to my surprise, it turns out the all-singing, all-dancing new Netgear media player and its bowl of format soup...
... showed not a flicker of recognition when I presented it with a VOB file last night. Nor did it manage with PNG files. I've also yet to work out exactly how to point it at some non-volatile local storage for it to keep stuff as it is diskless, though it's got some on-board RAM. I shall have to try shoving a memory stick up its bottom (as it were). But it's totally silent in operation, which is always a plus feature of living room kit. And one of the canned Internet radio streams (happily) is NPR's "Wait, wait, don't tell me" weekly quiz, so that was good.
I have to say...
... this well-written but excoriating book review doesn't tempt me (but then I never had any great liking for Mailer's 'prose', and Monroe's appeal also rather passed me by). Source and snippet:
Divorced from the morbid pictures, sold in a pulp paperback, the writing could be considered a recommended but nonessential work by Mailer. But the pairing of voyeuristic nipple studies and fantastical descriptions of trauma has all the intimacy and delight of a Pap smear. And really, who needs to fork over a thousand bucks for the literary equivalent of a diamond-studded speculum?
Trouble, right here...
... in River City? In the past five minutes we've been visited by first a motorbike cop and then a little squad car. How exciting is that? [Lunchtime pause] Well, it seems Laura Norder has left the vicinity. (Link.)
I can't pretend...
... the quality of my painstakingly re-ripped MP3 files is enhanced by the Netgear box, but it's the most satisfactory method2 I've yet found of playing the little devils. Little things please little minds, as they say. Meanwhile, my subconscious is beavering away working out exactly what I intend to do with my new-found ability to turn my DVDs into (relatively) small digital files very easily. Streaming or not, I could get quite used to this one-box approach.
The similarity between parts of Dave Gilmour's guitar music on "The Division Bell" and the earlier BAFTA-award-winning soundtrack music (by Eric Clapton) to the superb TV drama "Edge of Darkness" sent me in search of that latter, but I'm not going to pay nearly £100 for less than 20 minutes of music. I'm not completely mad. Yet.