2012 — 31 March: Saturday
I tried. I really did.1 I'm sorry, but I still can't take the platitudinous twits to be found on BBC Radio 4 casting their pearls in front of the nation on a cool Saturday morning. Back to Brian Matthew and the music from (gasp) over 40 years ago.
Bots rule
John Brunner would surely have got a kick out of the idea of Wikipedia bots performing edits to the English-language version...
I was tickled by the "Three Revert Rule" which brings to mind not only Brunner's 'Shalmaneser' supercomputer but (of course) the Bellman's rule ("What I tell you three times is true") from that bold expedition in search of the elusive Snark.
Whether the claim that any bots have become self-aware, though, is a whole different ball of wax :-)
Since Christa's death...
... I find I've become much more open to emotion. Indeed, one of our recent walking topics was song lyrics and the extent to which some approach poetry.2 I confess I never really paid much attention to lyrics in my earlier listening. I certainly tended not to play and replay songs. (Indeed, until Dad's acquisition of a reasonably decent hi-fi in 1971 I mostly listened to radio speech items. Many of my earliest records in and after 1971 were classical or jazz. And I've never been able to make the slightest sense of opera despite several close friends assuring me it's one of the highest forms of art.)
Half an hour ago, Brian Matthew played the Simon and Garfunkel track "I am a rock" and I found tears streaming down my face, for heaven's sake. I expect it's not too difficult to deduce the line in the third verse that slammed me briefly into the ground, as it were. Amazing.
Definitely time for some breakfast :-)
I wish e-buyer would stop dangling tempting SSD flash drives in front of me. I know I don't need one. But...
Even if I...
... do say so myself, I have managed to amass quite an amazing collection of music files. I've just updated both "Boom" and "Foobar2000" and am having a fine old time sorting, merging, and de-duplicating another batch of tracks. While listening to the soundtrack to Ghost World. [Pause] Which naturally sent me in search of my original Daniel Clowes graphic novel, but which has only so far turned up the screenplay collaboration between he and Terry Zwigoff that was published about five years later.
However, straining my eyes to read the (literally) small print of the footnote that I now notice Zwigoff added to the section about the musical choices made for the film (which Christa and I very much enjoyed when we saw it in the Harbour Lights cinema) ...
... I've downloaded the Skip James recording he mentioned, and can confirm that the version of "I'm so glad" is, indeed, vastly different to the later recording by 'Cream' — though since I don't have that particular track on my only 'Cream' CD, and my completeist urges are running out, I shall leave it at that. (I did sample a fragment of the 'Cream' track on Amazon, but it failed to grab me.)
Time (17:06) for the cup that refreshes, methinks.
Being Elmo
I mentioned this documentary a while ago and have finally succumbed, pre-ordering it from the USA just a couple of days before its release on DVD. This, after a fruitless search on Amazon UK. Meanwhile, my current (20:10) musical entertainment is the set of 24-bit FLAC files that were my downloadable "reward" for buying the Peter Gabriel 2xCD "New Blood".
