2012 — 11 August: Saturday
One of the two films last night had completely escaped my notice1 until now. "The best exotic marigold hotel" may have been a little formulaic, but the cast and crew turned it into cinematic magic. Had I realised it was directed by John Madden, and scripted by Ol Parker, I would have latched on to it rather sooner. T'other film was "Ever After", which Christa and I had both enjoyed first time around.
The weather threatens to be nice again... two days running; what's gone wrong? Last night's quarter moon at about 01:00 as I turned on to the deserted motorway was a strange mixture of yellow and orange. It looked most unnatural. (Having read Larry Niven's "Inconstant moon" many, erm, moons ago, I always like to keep a wary eye on our nearest neighbour.)
"Keep watching the skies." :-)
Still...
... ridiculously interesting, three years after I first found these two places. (Link #1 and link #2.)
Breakfast beckons.
No, not the fish again!
What would Gilbert and Sullivan have had the Mikado say about the punishment fitting the crime, I wonder? Source and fishy snippet:
This stimulating book examines the ways in which legal systems have attempted to regulate sexual activity over millennia, from the 'slow impalement of unfaithful wives' in
Mesopotamia to the 'sterilisation of masturbators' in the United States...
Besides punishment for transgression, Berkowitz looks at legal provision for revenge. In the Greek Classical period the husband of an adulterous woman was permitted to insert
a spiky fish into his rival's anus. The book includes a pleasant picture of the fish.
I won't make any barbed comments.
Mind you, speaking of anal payloads, how's this for a barbed comment? It's appended to a fascinating and well-argued review of a bete noire of mine — psychiatry and, in particular, the ridiculous (dare one say "insane"?) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Source and snippet:
There's a lot we can learn from the recent controversies surrounding antidepressants, and by a lot I mean only one thing, best articulated by Lewis Black:
"Doctors don't know. They pretend to know. Because they have a rectal thermometer in their pocket. As if it was an appeal to a higher authority."
Having some fresh...
... double cream left over, what finer use to make of it than in an Irish coffee, courtesy of Big Bro's bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey? Yum.
Somewhat later, I'm...
... left wondering how it got to be 23:03 with so very little forward progress. Oh, that's right. I'm retired. But I've established that, although the switching and selection of digital audio inputs on the Audiolab CD player leaves rather a lot to be desired, the basic quality of the sound presented via the unbalanced analogue outputs is just about as good as I've ever heard — certainly on any of my own systems.