2012 — 11 July: Wednesday
Another morning cuppa.1 The weather (at 09:58ish) remains rather yucky for midsummer. This must be the latest I've got up in many a month.
Who cares?
I don't always agree with people who comment on the Grauniad website, but I could have written this particular post myself:
I'll try and be succinct.
My 95yr old Gran has just gone into a care home. As she is losing her marbles she is under control of another family member via Power of Attorney. I have been told that not only must
her house be sold to pay for her care, but also all of her stuff.
What bothers me is that we, as a nation, waste money on aircraft carriers with no aircraft, helicopters with no software, nuclear weapons that we will never use, getting to Birmingham
20mins earlier, the Olympics... and we are forced to eBay Granny's dining table and chairs to pay for her care, after she spent her whole working life paying into a system to look after her.
Neither Big Bro nor I have the least problem with dear Mama's nest egg financing her care, but it has to be said that the UK does fling its taxpayers' money around in some mighty strange directions, and reward the incompetent stewards of many of the institutions involved for failure rather than success.
Now why would Tory backbenchers want to block reform of the House of Lords? Just askin'.
Who says computers are stupid?
I enjoyed this piece, taking umbrage at only one assertion (in the Metadata section). Source and snippet:
People do not normally add metadata to things they write or purchase. It's tedious. People do, however, enjoy classifying themselves and their interests. In retrospect, the commercial implications of this are obvious, but when social networks first arose they did not seem like great repositories of metadata.
What's that up in the sky?
No. Not the sun... this.
Two hours or so...
... of comparative lucidity on display at the care-home and Big Bro is now fully up-to-speed (as it were) with the current state of dear Mama. The weather remains rather nasty. Tonight's entertainment — if that's le mot juste — may well be the "Battle for Haditha" — the Nick Broomfield item delivered earlier today:
I may yet chicken out. I'm still quivering from the shock of a lady announcer on BBC Radio 3 who's just cheekily linked the EL James "Fifty Shades" trilogy I've now finished to a lovely piece of Thomas Tallis. (Without fully establishing the context of the scene in which the music actually features; that's cheating!)
I started him off with the Errol Morris documentary "The Fog of War" in which Robert McNamara more or less directly addressed the camera with the benefit of the hindsight developed by the time he was 85 years old. Now he's watching "Haditha" and I intend to retreat upstairs for a while.