2012 — 3 November: Saturday
And then, just occasionally, there are those days1 when sleep doesn't so much flee as fail to show up in the first place. At which point, one may as well wander back downstairs and potter around.
Six years to the day since my last day in IBM. Golly! Where did it all go? [Pause, for sleep.] That's a bit better. And the sun is shining on a pretty chilly morning as Brian Matthew approaches the end of his first hour with "The Ice cream man". Where does he find them all?
I have one book...
... by Abbie Hoffman. It came out in 1971, and its title is "Steal this book". If I could lay my hands on it I could quickly check to see what its opinion might be on this tale of an author abetting a pirated translation of his novel. Source and snippet:
In late March, a couple weeks into his work, AlexanderIII unceremoniously dropped my novel and began translating Dennis Lehane's Gone, Baby, Gone. (A sample query: "Could you please help me out with a difficulty ... 'you are on fucking angel dust.'?") I was shattered. Even my pirate translator had lost interest in my book. But in early July, Google Alerts informed me that AlexanderIII had dropped Lehane and returned to the good stuff.
I well remember buying a paperback copy of the third volume of "Lord of the Rings" — from an American publisher (Ace Books) — that had not been subject to any contract between Tolkien and Ace. I bought it as it also reproduced all of Tolkien's "Appendix" material2 which (for reasons lost in the mists of time) I wanted to have. Here, 45 years later, we see an American author complaining about Russian piracy. Neat, somehow. I wonder how that variant novel written from the point of view of the Orcs as good guys is coming along?
Humax PVR games
My brave chum Brian has been modifying the firmware of the same model of Humax hi-def satellite PVR that I make so very little use of these days. His justification? The Humax upgrade, for me, serves a totally different purpose, web access to my main PVR and its recordings.
70 years on
I've been listening, fascinated, to this programme (GI Britain) about the GIs in the UK during World War II. Somewhere on my shelves — perhaps even adjacent to Abbie Hoffman's — is Juliet Gardiner's 1992 book "Over here: the GIs in wartime Britain". One chap's memories briefly reduced me to tears, as telling it did him. But I had to smile on hearing that a group of GIs, looking out at the ads on a railway station, were met with two exhortations that greatly puzzled them:
Feel knocked-up in the morning? Drink Ovaltine. Keep your pecker up. Drink Ovaltine.
What sort of a country was this, they wondered :-)
I've heard it...
... suggested, on occasion, that "comics are (only) for kids". I disagree, as does Trina Robbins in her book "From Girls to Grrrlz". How's this for a frame? It's from Colleen Doran's Renegade Romance #2, 1988.
I note from one of her websites that she's been trying to re-assemble the original artwork for her "A Distant Soil" saga...
... after a printer went bankrupt and files went astray. Ouch.
Having been...
... tipped off by Brian, I've actually had a live televisual evening (punctuated by incessant firework explosions) as I watched the Inspector Montalbano programme for the first time ever, finding it quirkily enjoyable. It was preceded by a rather information-lite 'Horizon' on the Earth's core, and has been succeeded by a (so far) moderately interesting examination of Euro-horror films. Both documentaries (adhering to modern convention) seem to find it necessary to have intrusive music, restless camera work, and walking/talking heads and/or staged 'dramatic reconstructions' in sound-bite-sized digestible little chunks.
Neither received my full attention (nor merited it). But I did give the Italian Inspector proper attention. I've also ordered the first three paperbacks.