2011 — 31 December: Saturday
Quite implausibly1 this is my sixth New Year's Eve since retiring, and my fifth without Christa to share my midnight toast.
Meanwhile, the string of old hits that Brian Matthew is playing all too closely resemble the material I've been busily moving around as I remove duplicate tracks and try to bring a certain amount of coherence to the subfolder organisation. Since it looks dull, grey and wet out there I prefer this particular indoor sport this morning.
Another occasional sport involving a string of old bits (a semi-annual event, more or less, if I remember) is the network speed test between me and (arbitrarily) New York:
Not too shabby, and more than enough for most purposes.
I mentioned the...
... other day my nagging suspicion that, as I age, I seem to know less and less about more and more. Turns out it's not just me. Source and snippet:
We think we understand how something works, how all those shards of fact fit together. But we don't... Given the increasing difficulty of identifying and treating the causes of illness, it's not surprising that some companies have responded by abandoning entire fields of research. Most recently, two leading drug firms, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, announced that they were scaling back research into the brain. The organ is simply too complicated, too full of networks we don't comprehend.
I can drink to that.
Speaking of alcohol, Big Bro had suggested, in his latest annual 'round robin', that he expected to hear of daughter #4's wedding plans in due course. My invitation has just landed on the doormat. They are obviously not tainted by superstition as they've opted for Friday 13th April, in a place called Waimauku. Long way to go for a glass of tonic, methinks.
Lies, damned lies...
Some stories circulate endlessly, it seems. I've just heard the BBC main radio news tell me that PC Plod in Hertfordshire was so impressed with polygraph testing that she wants to roll it out throughout the Untied Kingdom. I've linked here before. Would I lie to you?