2012 — 4 March: Sunday
The morning rain1 is very welcome for all sorts of reasons, but walking isn't one of them. A fatal police shooting in a Cheshire village? Doesn't sound like the Cheshire of my formative years. And a dreadful train wreck in Poland. Back to music, methinks.
"Live fast, die young. Bad girls do it well." Now what could that be all about?
Processing
How have I managed to miss this? Haven't you always wanted an "Ambient()" material property? Mind you, it's not just the visual arts that could benefit from a splash of programming literacy. (Link.)
Meanwhile, I know at least two people eager to get their coding fingers on one of these:
Last time I (consciously) used or programmed an ARM machine it was a 202MHz StrongARM in an Acorn RiscPC with a mere 64MB of RAM. A fun machine. Hard to believe I left that architecture behind a decade and a half ago.
Simple question
Found, and dusted off, last night up in the books warehouse while browsing idly around. I'm a sucker for striking magazine cover images, and who doesn't like this wonderful singer?
Now, guess the date2 that is (deliberately) too small to read...
I still recall my cousin Jayne (the DTP and graphics wiz who's worked on setting up systems for several major publishers of newspaper "colour supplements" around the globe) being very interested in getting hold of my copy of this 1982 book ...
... on the only visit she made to us in the early 1990s — she was also quite keen on the DTP capabilities of the Acorn (ARM3) Archimedes I demonstrated to her. It was, after all, less than a third the price of an 'equivalent' Mac-based system at the time. And probably faster. Like all-too-many people, she'd never even heard of the Acorn platform.
In the unlikely event that there is a completeist reading this (other than me, that is), the 15 cover "details" are (left to right):
- L'Illustration by Eugène Grasset, Christmas 1893
- Motor by Howard Chandler Christy, May 1923
- Art International by Gaetano Pesce, February 1971
- Saturday Evening Post by Norman Rockwell, January 1962
- Fortune by Fernand Léger, December 1941
- The Ladies' Home Journal by Frank S Guild, April 1903
- Avenue by Henri Rousseau, October 1974
- L'Estampe Originale by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893
- Arts Magazine by Chuck Close, June 1978
- The New Yorker (their annual cover) by Rea Irvin, February 1925
- Pastimes (Inflight magazine for Eastern Airlines) by Pat Field, July 1974
- New York by William Klein, May 1979
- Stern by Peter Lindbergh, February 1979
- Vanity Fair by Bolin, January 1928
- The Inland Printer by Carl S Junge, February 1917
Possibly too much detail, I agree.
Led astray
One of the last tracks played by the ever-wonderful Cerys Matthews was a "work in progress" variant of "Mother" from Pink Floyd's 1979 album The Wall. I recall listening to the entire album three times, back-to-back, during a nasty bout of 'flu just a couple of months before Peter was born, which gave a certain resonance to the track about "When I was a child, I had a fever..."
So having been reminded about the existence of this deluxe 'Immersion' version on sale for a ridiculous £88 or so, naturally (!) I've just downloaded the MP3 files for a much more reasonable sum. Though I've no idea what happened to the £1 discount Amazon said would be automatically applied.
It's 12:43 and still raining. Time for a bite to eat. Hold it! Make that sleet, not rain. It's all of +1C out there, too. Crikey.
Casting my net...
... along another bookshelf upstairs, I found this even earlier image of the Eurythmics. The photo was taken by Gered Mankowitz in 1982.
I'm one of those...
... ghastly people who have been known, on occasion, to write in the books they own. I was just about to consign Donald Kilby's "Manual of Safe Sex" to the dustbin of history — it dates back to the Cold War, after all — when I spotted this little item in the section outlining the indirect evidence for a herpes link to cervical cancer:
I can tell I was puzzled when I first read it, and I have to admit I am still puzzled quarter of a century later.
Time to put on a glad-rag or two. I'm off for an evening meal and a film (or two) over in Winklechestershire. Serendipity rules.