2012 — 17 April: Tuesday
It's too early1 to think about breakfast this morning, though last night's breakfast was spent delightfully at Tiffany's. The restored print looked wonderful, and the film remains most enjoyable. Plenty of extras,2 too.
My brief listen to BBC Radio 4 has been quite enough to convince me that today's weather has definitely knocked any prospect of a walk on the head. But the good thing about retirement is it doesn't matter.
Guns and butter
I don't imagine too many members of the NRA will be reading this over their hominy grits and pancakes. Source and snippet:
For centuries before the first English colonists travelled to the New World, Parliament had been regulating the private ownership of firearms. (Generally, ownership was restricted to the wealthy; the principle was that anyone below the rank of gentleman found with a gun was a poacher.) England's 1689 Declaration of Rights made a provision that "subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their condition and as allowed by law"; the Declaration was an attempt to resolve a struggle between Parliament and the Crown, in which Parliament wrested control of the militia from the Crown.
Beautifully-written, and full of bizarre information. Speaking of which, I found yet another reference to that upcoming ever-fatter new edition of the psychiatric diagnostic manual, this time mentioning the difficulties of grappling with its updated definition of narcissistic personality disorder. That sounds pretty cool. It was buried towards the end of an interesting piece about Facebook and loneliness.
This, however, is from the preceding paragraph of that piece:
Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a
phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. ("Look how
casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!")
Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation.
Ouch. But I love that last sentence. Enough! Time to go and curate my breakfast cereal (or should that be 'serial'?).
Mere moments later, or...
... so it seems, I've just got back from a supplies foray more or less ahead of what looks like the contents of a very dark cloud just waiting to unload itself. It's 15:00 and, by my reckoning, time for a cuppa.
I was mildly shocked — having just played "Kelvingrove Baby" by The Bathers — to see how expensive some of their other material is, but I snaffled a very reasonably-priced MP3 download of an earlier album ("Sweet Deceit") and it's tinkling away as I type. By the time it finishes it will be time to sort out tonight's warming little splash of curry, methinks. It's somehow become 18:41 already, and is a nice, sunny early evening after being mostly grey out there today. At this rate, I may even get a walk in tomorrow.