2012 — 23 August: Thursday
I'm not sure whether it constitutes Karma1 but a brief chat with my friend Brian the plumber yesterday — who whistled to draw my attention as I was just about to drive out to the care-home — revealed that he's doing some remedial work on the heating system in the highest-integer house2 on "my" little estate.3 It seems they have precisely the same level of 'merde' in their heating system and a boiler on its last legs (as it were). Makes sense; that house is about two years older than mine and its first two sets of owners both left long before these problems tend to reveal themselves. If offered a home built by "Dare Developments" it may be wise to have a particularly thorough structural survey.
That's enough footnotes. Time for some breakfast.
Last night's viewing...
... of the "starling" performance of Jodie Foster in The silence of the lambs — a film Christa and I watched in Soton in July 1991 (while we left Junior home alone — wicked parenting, or what?) — confirmed my original summary of it to Carol:
Just watched Half Moon Street from the Theroux novel. Much as I like gazing at Sigourney Weaver's unclad form, and much as I have to admire Michael Caine's effortless acting, I found the way she has to be so wimpish after spending 90% of the film as the strongest and most intelligent character somewhat irksome. Have you, en passant, been to see Silence of the Lambs yet? I found the Thomas Harris novel gripping. More random thoughts of a random fella tomorrow...
Just got back from the cinema. We left Junior watching (and very much enjoying) Midnight Run with de Niro and Charles Grodin. We caught up with Silence of the Lambs. Good but rather grim...
I note "tomorrow..." turned out to be exactly a week later. Work had a habit of intruding. I really don't miss work! Anyway, I last owned "Lambs" on an NTSC LaserDisc (very possibly one Carol brought over with her on one of her not-frequent-enough trips) and also still have Howard Shore's music score on a CD. Since Christa wasn't over-impressed I didn't bother to get the film on DVD. And the cheap Blu-ray (delivered yesterday) wasn't particularly crisp, but was well-stuffed with documentary extras, some of which were actually interesting. I hadn't known that the FBI "academy" only dated back to 1972, for example.
I figured, having watched so many "police procedurals" in the last year ("Castle", "Bones", "The Mentalist") I might as well go back to one of the first examples. The new elevation of the plasma screen is a worthwhile improvement, by the way.
It may be mundane...
... but I'm off out in an after-lunch search for the perfect kettle and teapot combination. "I may be gone some time". [Pause] And now I can better understand Christa's occasional frustration after similar shopping expotitions. Nothing I saw quite peeled my banana.
Mercy me. When did it become 19:26? No wonder I'm starving hungry. I shall get right on it, as it were.
Now here's an interesting perspective. Source and snippet:
But I also can't help but notice that the man on the street seems to be much more concerned about privacy and confidentiality than he is about whether he lives or dies if he was a subject of a
randomized controlled trial of a chemotherapeutic agent...
In other words, you can readily get through institutional review boards research proposals which propose to take 100 people with cancer and randomize half of them to get a drug and half not, in
which the risk of a mistake leads to the death of the subject. And yet, if you propose to do something in which you ask people about their sexual behavior, everyone gets up in arms.
Speaking of sexual behaviour, the chapter 'Studying Sexual Lifestyles' (Sexual Behaviour in Britain, 1994) touches on its famous predecessor's [Kinsey, of course] survey: 'Most people at the time understood that the official norms of sexuality did not quite match practice in American society, but also understood that sexual conduct that did not match those norms was harshly judged. The publication of the Kinsey volumes exposed to an entire society the difference between official dogma and the actuality of people's lived experience'.
The Christakis piece is a good read. As for the Kinsey reports, which I first read in the Hatfield Polytechnic library in 1970 or thereabouts... Readers of a sensitive disposition should maybe avert their gaze :-)
I'm reminded of one of Alfred Kinsey's longest and strangest interviews. There was something of a ripple early in 1998 when it was belatedly (50+ years on) revealed during a TV documentary coinciding with a couple of new Kinsey biographies (Alfred C Kinsey: a public/private life, (1997) by James H Jones, and Sex: the Measure of all things, (1998) by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy) that the interview was (more accurately, had been) with a paedophile. This was not, actually, a new revelation, but it was apparently new to the UK TV audience.
For example, Richard Rhodes encountered the story of this 63-year-old man back in the summer of 1981 while he was attending a two-day weekend seminar on 'Extended Sexual Orgasm' hosted by Alan and Donna Brauer, in which the Brauers described how Kinsey and his associates went about gathering their sexual data. He later wrote this seminar up in a short article in Playboy (see? there are interesting articles to be found there!) and later still recycled it into the chapter called One Summer Morning... in his 1992 book Making Love: an erotic odyssey.
Vern L Bullough tells the actual story in Science in the bedroom, (1994): "The interview took some 17 hours and involved both Pomeroy and Kinsey... this man was sought out because he was known to have kept accurate written records of his sexual activity, a not uncommon occurrence among paedophiles. The man had sexual relations with 600 pre-adolescent males and 200 pre-adolescent females, as well as intercourse with countless adults of both sexes and with animals of many species. He had developed elaborate techniques of masturbation and reported that his grandmother had introduced him to heterosexual intercourse and that his first homosexual experience was with his father."
The family that plays together, heh? 'Nuff said. Meanwhile, Tom Ravenscroft has been playing some excellent music. And, while doing the blinds and curtains round a while back now it struck me as almost autumnal out there.