2012 — 18 October: Thursday
I don't like to think of myself as unduly prejudiced1 but, based on yesterday evening's Guy Barker orchestrations of Miles Davis, I'm going to be sticking to the original, with occasional detours into Gil Evans and Marcus Miller... I listened to the entire first half, plus the interval jabber, but quickly thereafter succumbed to listener fatigue and the more attractive option of a couple more "West Wing" episodes.
Further overnight rain, but it's windy up there, if the scudding grey stuff is any indication. Hard to tell from inside my hermetically sealed living room. I have a lunch date with Len for which I need to remember a £10 voucher. Ought to be able to manage that. I've also invited my son to share his weekend travel plans with me ahead of time though I gather he's still sorting out contracts for his house building work. And I've just painlessly upgraded my excellent text editor. To paraphrase Mae West, a good text editor is hard to find, and well worth hanging on to.
Surely...
... forcing energy companies to put their customers on their lowest price tariffs automatically is actually the ultimate in competition? Apparently not. The lobbyists have been piling in quickly and with a vengeance:
Gotta love that "not might".
Why not simply re-nationalise the price gouging illegitimate sons of flea-infested bean counters and be done with it? Oh, wait, free market competition is more efficient. Yeah, right. One gas pipe, one water pipe, one electricity cable, one phone line, and a set of ever-varying tariffs that even their hordes of marketing agents don't always understand. It's as absurd as having multiple train companies using the same set of rails and signalling apparatus but their own baroque set of ticketing rules. Total Thatcherite bollocks, in my opinion.
Why not simply forbid boardroom bonuses to all but the lowest tariff company? Perish the thought :-)
Who says...
... experimental research in neuroscience has to be dull? Source and snippet:
Elimination from the game is associated with sharp, widespread activation all over the brain, as well as activation slightly to the right of the brain. Researchers prefer to interpret this as
the first evidence for "loss aura," or the physical manifestation of disappointment. They acknowledge, however, that the neural signature for loss aura is indistinguishable from the signature
of a participant screaming and punching the inside of the scanner...
Researchers have also identified a signal corresponding to how badly a player has to pee, and can now predict, within a minute's accuracy, when he will wet himself.
"Risk processing" by another name? :-)
But there's already a word for that... dept.
I spotted the verb "embiggen" yesterday on a Grauniad graphic.
Sadly, it's still there today. It was relaunched in a 1996 "Simpsons" episode.
Arriving back...
... after a very enjoyable lunch and natter with Len, and having fought off the temptation to borrow his (still shrink-wrapped) Blu-ray trilogy of the 'extended' Swedish TV versions of the Dragon Tattoo lady — I have the three titles as cut to a more acceptable running time, apparently — I was (virtually) greeted on my doorstep by a couple of CDs...
... neither of which seemed to be available as an MP3 download. Bat for Lashes is playing as I type, and await the arrival of a replacement power supply for the Raspberry Pi. Brian is swinging by with it, as he needs to get the 'faulty' one back to the supplier. The rain is still holding off, but has settled for looking very threatening.
And later...
... it's later. Time for some sleep, in fact.