2012 — 1 July: Sunday — rabbits!
I was the one left standing when last night's film ("Contagion") ended1 so, naturally, I was the one left to do the dishes. And me in the middle of updating some book lists with data from the last three years, too. Apparently I should be using "Sublime Text" rather than "Textpad". Who knew?
Still, at least I now know there's an updated release of Textpad.
That lovely (yet sadly unmissed)...
... chap Tony Bliar (remember him?) is paid "in the region of £3m a year to advise investment bank JP Morgan and insurer Zurich International". Truly, the world has wobbled off its sanity axis. Oh, and he wants back into UK politics,2 too. Now that's even scarier than "Contagion" even though I'm left-of-centre (whatever that means). (Link.)
Fifty shades...
... of opinion. The dear ol' Grauniad is getting its knickers in a moist twist over "Fifty Shades" a day after the Mirror. I noted a pile (is that le mot juste?) of these titles at the entrance to Asda a few days ago, but my Mirror-reading informant told me yesterday they've all gone. Meanwhile, Peter's g/f tells me she was 'unimpressed' by the first title of the trilogy.
Now I know full well that "everyone" is said to have a book in them. But — as AL Kennedy writing in that same "news" paper reminded us a while ago — "They have all kinds of things in them — liver, spleen, perhaps recklessly inserted lightbulbs. Whether you want any of those things to be removed and then sold to strangers is the question".
Quite.
Mr Speaker. The question I have to put before the House is: "Should I (try to) wake the young people?" It is, after all, 09:45 and they claimed to be wanting to make an early start. (Brambles and garden waste sacks were mentioned.) Tricky. Very tricky.
I conveyed Peter's g/f to 'Matalan' and three green bags of garden waste to the tip in the same trip. It's now 13:13 and they've just hit the road for Battersea. I should just about manage to re-assemble the house before Big Bro descends on me. He will be fighting for sleeping space with a further set of temporarily surplus PCs, including one in a mammoth games case — the same case my chum Len has, unless I miss my guess. I think he (Peter) thought it was going to be quiet. He's also deposited a second Buffalo Terastation that is mine should I choose to populate it with hard drives. I may yet discover it to be IDE rather than SATA; it has an elderly air about it.
Did I mention the over-flowing laundry hamper?
You might think...
... that when a chap bought a couple of books in Soton as recently as last October he'd have a fighting chance of finding more than 50% of them when he belatedly decides they should be in his you-must-excuse-the-phrase comprehensive database of same. Particularly as one of them (according to Amazon) is 28 cm tall. That automatically rules out many of my shelves in one swell foop. Grrr. I think I'm overdue a post-lunch cuppa.
Anita
As I continue to pursue the occasional lost3 titles — that is, those that failed to make it into my 'database' — I was poking around for the details of the hardback re-issue of "Anita" by Keith Roberts (that I spotted a year ago and bought from Amazon subsidiary AbeBooks) only to find a 9-hour audio download version of it from 'Audible' (now another part of the Amazon enterprise). So purely as an experiment I am now listening to this — having jumped the requisite registration and software installation hoops:
Since I had to 'login' to the player software it installed — visible if you click the pic — I suspect this is a DRM-protected MP3. I further suspect this will mean I can't park it on my NAS to play from there, though I certainly ought to be able to archive the 122MB file there for safe-keeping.
Without a Hitch
My sumptuous Alan Moore book popped back into local space a couple of hours ago from behind an obscuring row of lesser paperbacks. Good. Now that my evening meal is out of the way, accompanied by another episode of Battlestar Galactica — yes, I'm taking another run at it, having exhausted the appeal of "Castle", "Bones", and "The Mentalist" for the time being — I can report another of my 'lost' textual sheep — the book of quotes by (the sadly, now, late) Christopher Hitchens that I bought and chortled through in the middle of last year.
Here's a typical example of one of his verbal jabs, on religion and natural4 disasters:
When the earthquake hits, or the tsunami inundates, or the twin towers ignite, you can see and hear the secret satisfaction of the faithful. Gleefully they strike up: "You see, this is what happens when you don't listen to us!"