2012 — 2 November: Friday
I won't say the barometer has shot up this morning1 but the sun certainly has his hat on. Funnily enough I found that very song just last night, in an MP3 compilation of comedy tunes from the 1930s. I was browsing through Amazon's vast archive2 of spoken word, poetry and comedy items at the time — I called a halt some time after midnight and after 200 web pages and 4,800 items, precisely one of which found its way onto my hard drive.
So I now have my third album by John Trudell: "Blue Indians". I was introduced to this (Native American Indian) gentleman by Steve Gibbs of Pinpoint music, more years ago than I care to think about.
Time (09:35) for some breakfast and my next cuppa.
You don't say?
I'd been vaguely wondering where Mitt Romney came from. Source and snippet:
But perhaps there is now also a conviction that elected representatives have become too remote, too corrupt and too closely associated with the interests of an oligarchy to serve the common good.
The right, claiming to be liberal, takes advantage of this lack of confidence and suggests (as with Mitt Romney) that if you want to run a country you might as well first prove yourself by managing
a company or a hedge fund.
Yet fraud and waste are rife in the private sector, too. Unknown numbers of engineers, accountants and sociologists, trained at public expense, squander their talents on perfecting the lines of a
car bonnet, a new packaging material or a cigarette filter, or on designing outlandish insurance contracts and tax-free investment schemes. Financial success is almost always more important to a
company than the social value of its products.
From the same source comes a sobering look at "America's degree scam". (Link.)
As others see... others
Or, it's the same the whole world over.
As premier, Mr. Wen is responsible for the administration of the Chinese economy. He has cultivated the image of a simple man, who is close to the people and is often first on the scene of a disaster, earning him the sobriquet of "Grandpa Wen." At a time when income disparities in China approached some of the highest levels in the world, he offered reassurance to ordinary people that their concerns were considered at the highest levels of government.
Yeah, right.
The next batch of ...
... crockpottery has been sliced, diced, and set to stun (in about seven hours from now). Meanwhile, I caught the tail end of novelist Kate Mosse and her reaction to the last movement of Prokofiev's 7th Symphony so — probably inevitably — my latest downloads — none of which I know — for (considerably) less than a tenner are:
Including free "Record Company Required Metadata" :-)
Just the facts, ma'am
I recently enjoyed a piece by Peter Canby on fact-checking at the New Yorker that was excerpted here and which had prompted me to order today's delivery:
Although I've written pieces for numerous magazines over the years, I've never actually worked on a magazine's staff. Nor am I sure I'd enjoy the experience. But this little compilation is excellent.
My chum...
... Len not only knows how to pronounce "Cthulhu", but may even get a kick out of this stuff. If he clicks the text, that is...
I steer well clear of such games since, that way (clearly) lies madness. Or, failing that, addiction to pop tarts and a pale skin tone.
I have recently...
... disinterred, and hope shortly to resurrect, a piece of kit I last used back in my Shuttle PC days in 2004. It's a Nebula digiTV USB-connected external Freeview digital TV tuner with software that turns it into a PVR. Well, that's the game plan. I have the necessary aerial lead, updated drivers and application, but may well have to struggle through the activation process once again (given that it last ran on an XP Pro system on a completely different — and rather under-powered — 32-bit single core Pentium system). Failing that, I guess I could simply buy one of these new-fangled USB TV dongle things that do exactly the same for approximately sixpence.
Pah! Scratch that bright idea. An hour older, the only tangible effect (beyond a failure to detect the hardware) after rebooting has been to change my Google Mail display to all italic. Even when using Chrome. Go figure! I shall be exploring the modern dongle route next.