2012 — 17 January: Tuesday
As near as I can tell1 the current thermal gap between my little inner sanctum and the great outdoors (in which Mr Garden Waste has just made his noisy rounds picking up frozen bags of dead stuff) is 22.6C, a whole 17.5C of which is in here. Mind you, it's a little toastier upstairs. And a hot cuppa helps, too. It's 08:38 and there's (obviously) a thick coating of frost outside so, even if I do visit dear Mama today (one of my tentative plans), it won't be for some time.
There's seems to be a rash...
... of hard drive failures going around. The latest to succumb lives in Seattle, where its owner tells me he found the most recent salvageable backup is from six weeks ago. I wonder if anyone has ever done more than roughly estimate the amount of data going AWOL on this planet each day?
Speaking of nasty rashes, I find much that is repugnant (or, certainly, illogical) in the sentence2 here:
The justification of sinners solely by the grace of God through faith in Christ.
It's one of those sentences where I think I know most of the constituent words but (like Chomsky's 1957 sentence "colourless green ideas sleep furiously") any attempt to parse it for meaningful semantic content is fraught with problems. I was led astray (as it were) after learning of the existence of something called the "Evangelical Alliance" in a news story about the rebellion the boy Dave is facing from 100 Tory backbench (backwoods?) MPs who apparently short-circuit their brains at the thought of any attempt to legalise gay marriage.
I have never understood, and suspect will never understand, quite why our elected representatives are so ready to condemn some forms of what they regard as unacceptable behaviour while seemingly ignoring others. What was that about motes in eyes?
Euphemisms
On page 29 of the Electricity Market Reform consultation document (PDF here) is a delicious term — new to me — that means "power cut". Or Expected Energy Unserved (aka "EEU"). Conspiracy theorists assume that the smart meters (with their "remote kill" facility) that are being rolled out courtesy of the previous guvmint are really mostly for cutting off3 individuals' power supply selectively.
Where did I put the candles, Mrs Landingham?
Having just...
... topped up Mrs Hubbard's cupboard, I'm officially declaring it's too cold, grey, and dismal to trot on over to the care-home this afternoon. Perhaps if dear Mama had enough cerebral processing power to notice, respond, and what-have-you, I would (possibly) feel differently. But she doesn't, that's not going to change, and I therefore don't. So be it.
One day, perhaps, the guvmint will roll out a system of smart meters (with "remote kill" facility, of course) for help with topping up the Soylent Green warehouses? (You know, some days my sense of humour is almost as black as Christa's was.)
Does Google Mail...
... know I had a summer job, two years running (1968 and 1969), at the aluminium foundry run by Alcan Enfield in London Colney?
Or are they just guessing? [Pause] Having just done the twilight ritual of the curtains and blinds, plus the weekly "roll out the correct colour of waste bin", I have to say it's jolly cool out there. Brrr. Hibernation always struck me as a very sensible response to winter. [Pause] Nearly midnight: g'night.