2012 — 22 September: Saturday
Starting each sunny day1 as one means to go on, the first task is naturally the out-of-plan 'important' update to a web browser I don't use, but which is apparently baked so hard into the operating system as to require a system restart. I assume this is the same update that my laptop PC picked up last night as I was shutting it down.
Malware: mankind's greatest invention?
Big Bro sent over a photo of a likely local 'chuffer' — Pompey Pacific 70000 — that was puffing around Eastleigh eleven days ago. I think I heard it, or a cousin, just minutes ago this morning. Hard to be sure now that the back of the house is so hermetically sealed.
Someone needs to explain how "Peaches en Regalia" can possibly be 43 years old. (Brian Matthew doesn't play a lot of Zappa.)
It's certainly not news...
... that Big Pharma is as economical with the actuality as Big Tobacco. But it's both depressing and infuriating. "First, do no harm?" Nope. "First, make money. And quietly bury bad data." (Link.)
Time I wasn't here. There's a walk waiting to be walked. [Pause] And so back to base some six miles later, having made rather better progress than the poor devils trying to head South on the motorway. Lovely sunny day, ideal temperature for walking, scarcely a human to be seen.
While I was romping...
... around some of the bridleways of Hampshire, Mr Postie was handing over this evening's entertainment to the care of my neighbour's neighbour:
The Ry Cooder had been left malingering in my Amazon basket until it finally dropped by a couple of quid and I virtually pounced. The Kevin Spacey film is a version of the fragrant life story of that American lobbyist yclept Jack Abramoff. I was going to say "corrupt" lobbyist but that struck me as a tad oxymoronic, or do I mean "tort"ologous? :-)
Grrr. There's a key combination on TextPad — I haven't yet pinned it down — that, when I inadvertently hit it, promptly starts closing Windows down unless I notice in time. On this occasion I thought I'd squashed it, but it tried again about 30 seconds later so I've just forced a reboot. Still, that gave me time to make my next cuppa.
There's a school of...
... thought that asserts you should do (I presume, at least) one thing per day that scares you. I wonder if smearing this stuff...
... across a small set of fairly plain oatmeal cookies with a few embedded blueberries counts? As I mentioned, stinky cheese had its place on our repertoire, though largely for Christa's benefit and enjoyment, not mine. Our opinions on what we each classed as stinky tended to diverge.
Delightful...
... to hear Carl Djerassi chatting briefly to Clive Anderson as Djerassi's one of my heroes. And good to know he's finished another chunk of autobiography to appear next year. [Pause] I gave up on "Casino Jack" — not badly made, but the guy was so utterly repellent, and surrounded by such utterly repellent fellow travellers, I just didn't want to watch it. I really don't understand the right wing of American politics, even though I try to. Money, power and influence tend not to lead to uplifting lives. (Lord Acton was right.)