2012 — 25 September: Tuesday
It's funny1 how my spam email changes from time to time. Today, a mere two items both promising untold riches by working at home, and not even addressed to Christa for a change. Meanwhile the sun shines brightly and the grapefruit was delicious. And I have my first giant cobweb in the upper corner of the new patio door — on the outside, I hasten to add.
Not quite enough...
... to put me off the rest of my breakfast:
So roughly 350 million years ago is probably when life began to taste like chicken, right when some lobed fishes had fully transformed into the first terrestrial amphibians, like P. finneyae. It's hard to imagine that this trait has had any advantage for the animals that exhibited it, given that the only situation in which flavor is expressed is when the organism dies. (In fact, considering that we generally like the taste of chicken and go out of our way to kill chickens in order to taste them, you could say that tasting like chicken is a distinct disadvantage.) But it would appear that the taste has nonetheless persisted for hundreds of millions of years. So maybe instead of saying that the next pale, firm, mild thing you eat tastes like chicken, you should say it tastes like Pederpes finneyae.
Damsons don't...
... taste remotely like P. finneyae but I may nonetheless have discovered why Christa drew the line — as it were — at turning them into jam. Removing the last stone from a stewed batch is a messy and fraught process. Still, it was raining (again) when I began,2 and is now bright sunshine. The things I do to make my breakfast cereal somewhat tastier...
One of the differences...
... between me and Big Bro is neatly exemplified by the fact that I was reading a piece making a (good) argument for the moral case for sex before marriage...
We're obsessed with sex on television, in music and in advertisements, but we somehow lack the ability to talk about sex as a positive, moral, pleasure-affirming choice that, like any other adult decision, comes with a set of responsibilities. And when government money is going toward telling people to just wait until marriage, we are literally funding an idea that has never worked in all of human history, instead of supporting tried-and-true policies that could mitigate the harm of a sex-obsessed, but pleasure-starved, culture.
... when he sent me a one-line link to a YouTube clip assuming that I already knew all about this! (He was wrong.) It amused me to see the fate of each model shortly after "take off".
Glassy eyed
A casual aside in an interesting story on El Reg led me rather indirectly to a useful PostScript to PDF converter before I could read the full paper from Cornell (no, not Corning) referred to in the story. Thanks to RampantLogic I now have a freebie .ps to .pdf converter. First time I've ever needed one. Live and learn...
More fruit
It seems — were I to equip myself with a second Raspberry Pi, but this time dedicated to use as a Media PC — there is plenty of scope for remote controlling it from my Asus Android Tablet PC.
It probably uses less (¬fruit) juice than my Netgear Media Player, too :-)
My musical education...
... continues, much-assisted by random radio encounters. Last night, for example, before I'd finished listening to Gideon Coe playing a BBC archive session of a track called "Gorecki" by a popular modern beat combo (I'd never heard of) called "Lamb" I was downloading the album version. And this afternoon, having just heard a lovely version of the Hendrix song "Little Wing" played by Stevie Ray Vaughan on Planet Rock I've downloaded a "Best of" compilation bringing my SRV album total up to the only even prime number we currently know:
It's raining again — how very quickly it becomes very tedious.
I've just met...
... the concept of the Mea Culpa Triangle, courtesy of one of those Chuck Lorre vanity cards. Neat. Click the pic to see the textual "expansion":
The Sky's the limit
I find I'm strangely pleased at the thought of just how much money ($580m) News Corp paid for / tipped into MySpace without benefit. Mind you, the Dirty Digger's boss at the top of the UK BSkyB heap has just taken home a hefty annual salary and shares package:
"Emoluments" is such a nice word compared to "pay", don't you think? I extracted the table directly from the annual report. Elsewhere you can find a £7m figure quoted. Still, three million here, seven million there, who's counting? Crazy values. Nice work if you can get it.
I wonder if I've still got that stale crust and stinky cheese for my tea tonight.