2012 — 28 October: Sunday
As usual, I couldn't be bothered to reset any clocks1 "ahead" of time. My morning cuppa — despite being an hour earlier (or is it later?) — helps me do the trick. And last night's odd little second film (delivered yesterday, nestled in a giant box alongside Posy) also had a 'timely' theme...
... a variant on the sort of idea used in "In Time", in fact. Writer and Director Jac Shaeffer got there first, though. In her twist, the implanted clock counted down not your remaining life span but rather the time until you met your ideal partner. Complete tosh, obviously, but leading to a series of neat comedic situations. And, I should add, Emma Caulfield is very easy on the eyes. "Buffy" fans won't need telling that.
And music
I've yet to get to any of the nine compilation CDs also in that giant box. I need more time.
On with the show. It's 08:47 in new money.
Guess which...
... (male) glossy magazine editor holds this opinion before clicking on the quote:
I wonder if he ever met La Thatch?
Nicely put
As I've said, I judge a place by the quality of its book shops.
We have probably passed the point where there can be any credible objections to the existence and use of electronic readers. (I like the feel and smell of books as much as anybody, but come now: you can keep all of Montaigne and Tolstoy on a phone in your pocket. That's amazing.) And booksellers have wholeheartedly embraced the online selling that keeps them in business. Yet bookstores provide something irreplaceable that we shouldn't easily relinquish. Their knowing charms and surprises (even, admittedly, their parochialism and occasional cluelessness) spring from the people who run them and who decide what they will carry. Bookstores are, in essence, personal libraries. In this way, they are macrocosms of the books they contain — there is life inside them.
For reasons that...
... I cannot begin to explain, I had somehow managed to overlook the publication in 2010 of a book called "Sex at dawn". No matter, there's a new one out — "Sex at dusk" — that sets itself the task of demolishing its predecessor. And the journal Evolutionary Psychology contains a review of the latter that concludes, deliciously, that the former "has been caught with its ideological pants down". I don't recall the world of computers ever being very much like this. (Link.)
Edna O'Brien is proving to be a fascinating interviewee on Jarvis Cocker's "Sunday Service" on BBC 6Music. I think I may have to get hold of her new memoir.
[Pause] Just back from a meal with Mike followed by a showing of a dreadful piece of tosh called "Snow White and the Huntsman". Had you been planning to put it on my Xmas list, please don't bother! If its rival "Mirror, mirror" is even worse (as I believe it's reputed to be) then scratch that, too.