2012 — 29 April: Sunday
The way Junior's bedroom window gaped open this morning1 more than adequately gives the lie to the confident (but worthless) promises we were given by that son of Satan (aka an Anglian double-glazing salesman) just over a decade ago. Still, plentiful fresh air and distilled water are both Good Things, right?
No walk today, I suspect.
My friend Carol...
... and I swapped subscriptions for a number of years. She arranged for "The New Yorker"2 to be delivered here, and I reciprocated with the "Guardian Weekly", as she enjoys the crossword for some unfathomable reason. Some while ago I mentioned a set of Chris Ware covers for Thanksgiving — I've always kept an eye out for interesting magazine covers as, like beautiful fonts, they serve multiple purposes. Today's "Observer" features a gallery of ten rejected New Yorker covers; this one by Robert Crumb in 2009 being just one glorious example:
I've updated the link on my old diary entry to point to a five-minute audio interview with Mr Ware as the New Yorker archived its original page that showed his four pieces of cover art. Fair enough. I suppose it may well go without saying that I've just snaffled Amazon's last copy of the book, too :-)
Once upon a time...
... I might have jumped on this, but quite a lot of my admiration for Tolkien's original trilogy3 seems to have been abraded in the wake of the Peter Jackson films. Or maybe Life's too short to linger longer in that 'world'?
What better way...
... to begin a wet, Sunday afternoon than by letting Ubuntu upgrade itself (to 12.04 LTS) on the upstairs desktop PC while enjoying a cup of coffee and a croissant down here with BBC 6Music?
Long forgotten?
Prompted by an offhand remark by Roger yesterday afternoon, I wasted (spent) over an hour last night combing my way along the shelves looking, in vain, for the 1991 booklet published by Channel 4 to accompany John Emsley and Roger McGough's programme "An A-Z of the Elements". I was hoping to be able to refute the suggestion that iron is the most stable chemical element (something to do with its binding energy). All was not lost, however, as I did uncover my four books by Thorne Smith — a superb writer whose name had also come up during our random chat.
I even know it's 28 years since I last referred to these as there was a bookmark from the Granada Royale Hometel (in Dallas) on page 84 of "Night Life". I'd taken the (entirely reasonable) precaution of having the book4 with me on a two-week IBM trip to Texas and Florida (in July, for pity's sake — 104 Fahrenheit in a sunny car park by mid-afternoon) to try out the CICS Primer on some customers.
Judging by the...
... lack of substantive progress some six hours later, with the Ubuntu upgrade stalling dead in the water, I shall have to try again another day. It claims to have retained the 1,000+ files it managed to download, but now complains about being unable to download the Release Notes and keeps suggesting I check my Internet connection. Which seems fine for everything else on my little pieces of electric string. Grrr.
Having been (aurally) seduced by a track from 2008's "The Stranger" album Bleaklow played on 6Music's 'Freak Zone' I've just grabbed all 11 tracks as a download for a fiver from these chaps. (I was amused to see that one of their FAQs asks "What two objects does Sam have in his hands when he emerges from Shelob's cave?"! Odd, in light of my mention of Tolkien earlier today.) I even managed to remember how to use my long-dormant PayPal account.
I shall celebrate with a honey sandwich for supper. It is, after all, after 21:16 (and still miserable weather out there). But we've a local roads-only walk tentatively planned for tomorrow. The forecast is currently quite optimistic.