2012 — 12 September: Wednesday

For some reason, I got to thinking about vacations yesterday evening.¹ Should you wish, you can read my thoughts (in a peculiarly IBM context) here. Meanwhile, sleep having fled somewhat earlier than usual, I've tottered downstairs to make and enjoy cuppa #1 to the music of BBC Radio 3's "Through the night".

Shades of Bramah?

I somehow dropped the round tuit I needed yesterday to mention a delightful Chinese satire. Source and snippet:

Americans lack emotion. 95% of employees don't think their superiors' weddings have anything to do with them, so they never find an excuse to care about their leaders; in China, do the masses ever miss a chance to care about their leaders? Put another way, who in China doesn't dare to? Look how much feeling we've got.

David Wertime in Atlantic

And if you need reminding who Ernest Bramah was...

Nipplegate

Reading this (excellent) riposte to an absurd piece of American Facebook infantilism has cheered me up enormously. Researching the appropriate essay from Stephen Jay Gould's 1991 collection "Bully for Brontosaurus" is left as an exercise for the reader.

Breakfast completed. What's next, I wonder?

I'm now preparing some notes about the intended local webserver Mk II. (The Pi is now on order, but also [unsurprisingly] out of stock.)

The post-prandial...

... weather is doing very little to convince me I want to go out anywhere this afternoon. I think dear Mama will have to wait a while longer for my next visit. And, if it's better tomorrow then all the better for the walk we've tentatively arranged, too. Life in retirement is all about a balancing act between freedom and priorities :-)

Meanwhile, Mr Postie's just dropped off my next layer of defence against further blisters and a perfectly acceptable second-hand hardback copy of the book by Zenna Henderson I mentioned here. And, yes, it does contain the story I recently OCRed. What's more, out of it fell my classiest bookmark ever: an embossed invitation to a "Mother-Daughter Luncheon" held on Sunday 26 March 2000 in the Count Basie Ballroom of the Kansas City Marriott,² Downtown, hosted by St. Teresa's Academy, and consisting of a Senior Class Fashion Show. All for a measly $25 (includes photo). Crikey :-)

Finally, the drizzle has begun. It's been threatening to for ages. [Pause] The vine could use another trimming. Now, if only I could find those damned secateurs. She had them in 1977, in Old Windsor. They must be somewhere!

Christa, smiling as always

This is an amusing exercise. Particularly using it to calculate pi, of course. FORTRAN? Memories are made of that.

A long chat...

... with dear Mama's very sympathetic dentist, leading to our agreement to leave her "as-is".³ I've closely observed her mental disintegration — "reasoning" has no further part to play. Just as with the GP at the time of the "do not resuscitate" discussion last winter, I simply and clearly spelled out my responsibility and duty as her "health and welfare" attorney: to take expert professional medical advice, and act on it in a way that leaves her most calm and least troubled.

Nice, sensible chap placed in an impossible situation by the "system". I could not do his job. We parted on first-name terms :-)

Later

The 'drizzle' has turned a lot nastier. Ho-hum.

Footnotes

¹  In earlier years I tended to agree with the Good Doctor Asimov, who loathed them unless he could keep busy (which, in his case, meant taking his typewriter along).
²  Last time I stayed in a Marriott it was the one in The Hague, and I had to get up before breakfast and catch a tram to the airport to come home. That was an ICL business trip in 1978? 1979? to discuss the translation of some of the training material I'd written (about the ICL 1500 Series [that George Cogar desktop machine]) for our colleagues in the land of Edam. Quite why the marketing manager felt he needed me to be there was a mystery I never unravelled, but I wasn't going to turn down an expenses-paid 36 hours or so in Holland. Besides, I managed to pick up a piece of my traditional Swarovski crystal for Christa and an Ursula LeGuin paperback unavailable in the UK while my colleague was busy browsing a startling range of, erm, photographic material also unavailable in the UK.
³  The Hari Seldon approach. (She dispensed with her dentures many months ago. All attempts to persuade her to resume using them fail.) If asked "Do you want your teeth?" she replies "Oh, yes", but then gets distressed and agitated by any attempt by anyone to refit them, or take new impressions. Dr Fang tells me he has all too often wasted time, effort, and money struggling in this situation (invariably urged on by well-meaning but misguided relatives).