2012 — 18 July: Wednesday
There's an ancient1 joke about a meteorologist being a chap who can look into a lady's eyes and see weather... Today's tentatively planned walk may yet be deferred until the afternoon, which will be a first for us. I was struck by the almost complete absence of a dawn chorus. But I've yet to hear any howling as the wolves gather before descending on us from the hills.
The fact that...
... Rossini's "Thieving magpie" overture is playing at the moment merely adds a certain piquancy to the story you can find by clicking on the picture from this generic "Private Eye" multinational multi-purpose "apology":
My copy of Elias Canetti's rather turgid "Crowds and Power" left my dusty shelves at some point after August 1995. However, the chap who wrote the much more recent "The wisdom of crowds" (still a dubious proposition, in my opinion) has written an interesting short history of money. Source and snippet:
Money's decline in feudal times is worth noting for what it reveals about money's essential nature. For one thing, money is impersonal. With it, you can cut a deal with, say, a guy named Jeff Bezos, whom you don't know and will probably never meet — and that's okay. As long as your money and his products are good, you two can do business. Similarly, money fosters a curious kind of equality: As long as you have sufficient cash, all doors are open to you. Finally, money seems to encourage people to value things solely in terms of their market value, to reduce their worth to a single number.
Jeff Bezos. Why does that name ring a bell? :-)
Right! I'm off out to do my bit to combat the "world pandemic of inactivity".
Somewhat later
We got back into my car after our six-mile stroll and just a minute or so before it started to rain. Good timing. Next task is to assess what I need to do, or get, to make Big Bro feel at home again tomorrow. Nothing springs to mind :-)
I've been idly leafing again through Surowiecki's book — which I bought as a birthday treat in October 2005 — and have concluded that my initial rather dismissive assessment of it back then was unjustifiably harsh. I'd said "Not news to John Brunner!" which was clearly a reference to the global system of online 'Delphi' oracle boards he envisaged in the society described in his excellent 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider". So though Surowiecki's thesis remains strongly counter-intuitive, it's maybe not such a dubious proposition after all.
But when did I manage to become more receptive to new ideas, I wonder? Crikey.
Since my recent evening meal...
... was entirely my own invention, and dreamt up about five minutes before eating it, I don't know if it has a name. I shall therefore dub it David's "Basmati rice, chopped-up ham, and peas" concoction. With a dollop of mango chutney to liven it up a little. Yummy. If Delia could see me now. Or Christa, for that matter.
Today's horsefly bite — side of little finger, right hand — just made itself mildly felt in the hot washing-up water. But I'd squeezed the original puncture wound within seconds of spotting it, and that seems to have dispersed much of whatever it is that causes the irritation. I must confess I remain completely unconvinced of the usefulness of horseflies.
Speaking of people named Delia...
Many months ago, now, I lent out a tape cassette I'd recorded from the BBC (I suspect in the mid-1970s) of a collaboration between Barry Bermange and Delia Derbyshire called "The Afterlife". It's an interesting sound collage of ordinary folk voicing their opinions of what happens after life, literally. I'd forgotten (most likely in the wake of the great central heating and new boiler upheavals two years ago) that the chap I'd lent it to not only managed to recover a good quality recording from my rather inferior tape but that he also very kindly cut it to a CD-ROM for me as a 40-minute .wav file, 48KHz, 24-bit.
I've just stumbled across this (while looking for something completely different, naturally) and have now converted it into a VBR MP3, and jolly fine it is too. Meanwhile, I'm listening to Peter Gabriel's music for the Martin Scorsese film "Last Temptation of Christ". How it can possibly be 24 years old baffles me.