2012 — 26 August: Sunday
The weather has done something of a volte face1 — up to what mischief shall I get today, I wonder? Not a lot before breakfast :-)
Sad to lose Neil Armstrong, and somewhat strange, too, to hear a soundbite from Buzz Aldrin saying how much they'd been looking forward to a 50th anniversary re-union in 2019. That's the spirit, I guess — not that I'm a great fan of re-unions.
Meanwhile, human space travel hasn't really got off the ground, has it? Not only are we still stuck on this whirling stone ball with its thin and extremely vulnerable organic skin, but our various primitive warring tribes seem busily determined to foul our own nest with almost zero thought for the inevitable consequence.2 I find I tend to side with Frederik Pohl: ants might well do better.
Fear of the dark
Having (more or less) managed to cope with losing Christa, my remaining fears largely focus on heights, enclosed spaces, spiders above a certain critical mass, and dentists. My only fear of the dark, per se, stems from knowing full well the agony of the stubbed toe and the trodden-on piece of Lego (in earlier years). Nonetheless, I found this piece completely fascinating. Source and snippet:
During the day I feel every minute of my age but at night I return to being a terrified child over and over again. According to (Phillip) Hodson it's because, despite the outward ageing, I'm still the eight-year-old child sneaking a glimpse at a scary movie while my parents' marriage unravels. He offered me a typically obtuse quote from his most famous beard-stroking predecessor, Sigmund Freud: "I once heard of a child who was afraid of the dark who called out, 'Auntie, talk to me, I'm frightened.' She replied, 'What good will that do, you can't see me.'" No wonder therapy takes years! I think what he was saying was that talking helps dissipate terror.
Having just sneaked a mouthful out of my next batch of cereal topping I have to say that if there's a taste quite as nice as that of a freshly-stewed English plum (no added sugar) I can't recall what it would be just at this moment. Yum.
My lunchtime salad is now basking gently in what's left of the early afternoon kitchen windowsill sunshine for a couple of minutes to take the edge off its chill (there's not much to be said for a frozen hard-boiled egg, trust me). I've just been listening to a delightful hour of music and chat from Jimmy Cliff while puttering away at one of my database files. Thank goodness 'people power' persuaded the BBC not to close 6Music. Though why that Corporation continues to employ the ex-fizzy drinks marketing chap who made the case for that closure baffles me. Just one of the many reasons I could never be a politician.
Speaking of "puttering away"...
... it occurs to me that in the early days of my home computing when I wanted to sort a file, or merge a set of files, as often as not I had to write a little bit of code to do the work myself. Mind you, this was over a third of a century ago. (Ouch!) This afternoon, I've been flipping back and forth ad lib in a half-megabyte flat file of nearly 4,000 lines, sorting it effortlessly on three fields in about a tenth of a second from the comfort of my text editor.3 Even on my first (ARM2) Acorn Archimedes RISC machine this used to take minutes rather than fractions of a second.
I think it's time (18:10) to move on to some more nutrition and then another mode of entertainment.