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2012 — 21 June: Thursday

Overnight midsummer rain¹ might restrict our choice of walking venue, but the important thing is not to let it dampen our spirits, right? And there's a new translation of "Carmen" opening in Kirkwall — a quaint little harbour town I last visited in 1959 — by one Rory Bremner (if I just heard Sara Mohr-Pietsch on BBC Radio 3 correctly).

Farewell, Mr "Femlin"

I had no idea this talented artist was so, erm, old. (Link.)

Gormless is, ...

... as gormless does. From a Microsoft research paper (PDF file):

Since gullibility is unobservable, the best strategy is
to get those who possess this quality to self-identify. An
email with tales of fabulous amounts of money and West
African corruption will strike all but the most gullible
as bizarre. It will be recognized and ignored by anyone
who has been using the Internet long enough to have
seen it several times. It will be figured out by anyone
savvy enough to use a search engine and follow up on
the auto-complete suggestions such as shown in Figure
8. It won't be pursued by anyone who consults sensible
family or fiends, or who reads any of the advice banks
and money transfer agencies make available. Those who
remain are the scammers ideal targets. They represent
a tiny subset of the overall population. In the language
of our analysis the density of viable victims, d; is very
low: perhaps 1-in-10,000 or 1-in-100,00 or fewer will fall
for this scam.

Gotta admire that "fiends"... and that curious "1-in-100,00" for that matter. Then there's the case of the missing apostrophe. And, by the way, who says gullibility is unobservable? I've observed it many times... often in myself.

Right! Time I was elsewhere. Many miles to go before I sleep, or some such. No Frost in sight, of course.

I've had cause...

... to mention my chum Brian's taste in films before. On that occasion, he quite properly pointed me in the direction of Das Leben der Anderen. As did Ian in NZ and Roger on the other side of the 'village'. The lead female rôle was named Christa (played by Martina Gedeck). Brian's now indirectly led to my order for two further films featuring her:

• The Baader Meinhof complex directed by Uli Edel, who made the under-rated / overlooked / much derided "Body of Evidence" in 1993
• Mostly Martha which, unless I miss my guess, got reworked by the Hollywood machine as "No reservations"

I'm delighted to be able to report that the aforementioned Roger — the co-proprietor of the oft-mentioned Roger & Eileen Tea Emporium — came through his surgery yesterday and is, according to one of his sons, "doing very well". That is — literally — all I needed to hear. Brilliant news.

In days of yore...

... I had my own treasured set of second-hand bookshops in various towns. And I still tend to judge a town on the basis of its book shops. I thus enjoyed reading this, although I've never been to Edinburgh, and only once to Glasgow, when on the way to Oban in 1971. Source and snippet:

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Footnote

¹  Quite heavy, I noticed, on my skylight.