2012 — 9 September: Sunday
Being a chap of somewhat "focussed enthusiasms" — albeit ones that shift around1 quite regularly — and (more important) the leisure with which to indulge them (at least, when not being swept away by the always incoming tide of domestic entropy hereabouts) I've invited myself over to Winklechestershire this coming evening.
I've persuaded Mike to let me re-watch "The Hunger Games" on his large screen system before his own copy arrives. I am about 99% sure he will enjoy it. I also replayed the Mark Kermode film podcast from 23 March that featured both an interview with Jennifer Lawrence and the good doctor's review, he having then had just 3.5 hours of sleep after attending a midnight 'first screening' in a packed 19-screen multiplex in Boston.
The first cuppa went down to an amazing Bach cantata: Jesu, der du meine Seele, performed by Felix Prohaska. I can but hope it finishes2 before they plug Cerys in on an adjacent channel as she's apparently featuring a 60-year-old anthology of American folk music. Not as old as the Bach, agreed, but probably singing in English (which gives me a home team advantage). Besides, I hate conflict :-)
Speaking of leisure...
... this was quite a fun read. Source and snippet:
Everything depends on how we understand leisure. Is it mere idleness, simply doing nothing? Then a life of leisure is at best boring (a lesson of Voltaire's "Candide"), and at worst terrifying (leaving us, as Pascal says, with nothing to distract from the thought of death). No, the leisure Aristotle has in mind is productive activity enjoyed for its own sake, while work is done for something else.
Work, heh? I could happily sit and watch it all day long. As very neatly exemplified nearly a decade ago by this chap in the "New Yorker":
I popped him into one of my letters to dear Mama...
We've all been busy beavers to be honest. Christa's mob have rather cheekily asked her to consider upping her hours from five a day to six (partly to reduce their overtime bill, it seems) and Peter is now up against a project demo deadline that has meant working in his office all weekend under the disturbing eye of his boss, who will be performing the demo to a potential customer on Monday. Though it's realistic work experience, he's not taking it too well! I may get a brief respite, however, as there's a large Java-related trade show in San Francisco next week to which my main source of extra work is off, so I'm hoping I can do some catch-up.
... but never got any reaction. Somebody remind me why I wrote so often (weekly) to her for so long (12 years) with so little (one reply) reaction. I can no longer remember :-)
Financial fishy business
There's a first time for everything. Even if, a mere 104 years ago, FM Cornford (in his Microcosmographica Academica — a tiny tome clearly carefully read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by Sir Humphrey Appleby) deduced (from his Principle of the Dangerous Precedent) why "nothing should ever be done for the first time".
Hence the whale of a time I've just had transferring some pennies from what was Christa's bank in readiness to be able to fund both the new patio door and the next loan to Peter and Peter's g/f without leaving my customary account (at a different institution) gasping for breath like a beached flounder. I only realised, when attempting the transfer, that I'd not performed this particular financial sleight of hand in the nearly five years I've now (most reluctantly, I might add) been the sole account holder. It keeps me in my plaice :-)
Mercy me. Huey has just played "Flaming". One doesn't hear that on the radio very often!
The sense of dread...
... I felt all the time as I was watching "Hunger Games" late on Friday evening was only slightly mitigated today as I read the book even despite — obviously — being more or less fully aware of what was likely to happen at each point of the arc. The book is superb, by the way. Beautifully paced, plotted, and written. If the next two titles are equally gripping I shall be a complete convert. It reminded me at times, very powerfully, of each of these three predecessors:
And it strikes me that I've never had to re-read any of these. Heinlein's "Podkayne" also came to mind, if only for the teenage female protagonist. "Games" is astonishingly subversive, too, both as book and film. Let's face it: the basic core premise is almost unutterably horrifying. I can well believe the Board of Film "Classifiers" having long discussions about the amount of detail to include and/or linger on.