2011 — 4 December: Sunday
Whoever unkindly phoned me1 has at least got me out of the realm of Morpheus and into the arms of a nice, hot cuppa. Had I not pulled out the upstairs phone line yesterday as part of my inchoate process of tracking down an intermittent modem 'hang' (and I note my download speed is still up by 30% with just the kitchen phone in the loop [as it were]) the feeble ringing sounds from down here would have been more than adequately overlaid by the robust tones from the device on my landing shelf, and I would therefore have been woken in time to pick the damn' thing up before the caller gave up. Not that my early morning thoughts at this time on a Sunday are necessarily charitable towards, well, almost anyone who phones me at such a time actually.
Now that my second cuppa is a distant memory, my thought processes are in gear and they go something like "If it was an emergency, they shouldn't really be calling me" and "If it's not an emergency, they shouldn't really be calling me... at this time" not to mention the far more likely "And if it's a cold-call from overseas of a commercial nature, they can go jump in something nasty and gooey". All this because (a) I couldn't be bothered to put new batteries in the answer phone section of the device and (b) now that I've scoured the info section of my latest printed edition of the phone directory without finding the magic spell you can invoke to tell you who just called (and they almost invariably withhold their number in any case) I can't call them back.
Not that I necessarily would. I seem to have a fraught relationship with telecommunications technology. Dunno why. I've paid enough for it over the years.
Mrs Google...
... knew the spell (1471) of course. It was the care home (who have to call me within 24 hours of "an event"). They also called an hour later on my mobile, but I didn't hear that, either. Besides, quite what I'm supposed to do with an elderly mother who falls over at 06:00 without any apparent reason, or damage, escapes me. Still, now I know she's just had her breakfast, which is more than I have :-)
I have a strange...
... sense of humour.2 This made me laugh out loud. Source and snippet:
Many film critics, not all of them on medication, think that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is still the acme, apex and apotheosis of the Chinese meaningful violence martial arts art movie, mainly because of the purportedly balletic beauty with which its featured personnel run up the sheer walls of the Forbidden City and along the treetops of the enchanted forest while slicing at each other with whirling swords made from fragments of a meteorite forged in the book-lined cave of a Confucian philosopher, with extra boiled rice.
Just one of the deliciously-phrased rants available on Clive's web site as well as in the book I bought a couple of days ago.
This is an amusing bit of musing, too, with an excellent opening paragraph... "But when you vote Lib Dem, the last thing you expect is to end up complicit in what a government is doing..." In all my years of voting (and I always voted Liberal) I only once even got an MP, let alone a soggy coalition guvmint of the devils. (Link.)
Blimey. I had no...
... idea men were so much better than women... at suicide. (Link.)
It's only 22:37 but I've now had enough for a day that began rather too early for my liking. So, as soon as Bill Frisell's delicious variant of "I heard it through the grapevine" concludes I'll be off up the stairs to Bedfordshire. G'night.