2012 — 1 December: Saturday — Rabbits!
I'm willing to bet that one of last night's films1 delivered more laughs than anything said at any TED event this year. I certainly haven't laughed so long and hard at anything for rather more than five years, believe me. We preceded it with Channing Tatum's somewhat autobiographical examination ("Magic Mike") of the life he led at one point before his Hollywood career. Quite funny in parts, but swerving just after the mid-point2 into a wholly different flavour of story. I recommend both titles.
The overnight frost will finally see off the seven latest rosebuds, I suspect. It's currently -4C on my front porch. Today is going to be a day for staying cosily at home wrangling my music collection. Since the last time I had it all loaded into a "handling" system I have tried to clean up a great deal of the meta-tagging and deal with duplications, so I shall be interested to see what the newest incarnation of iTunes manages to make of it all.
One of my (misguided) chums...
... makes sporadic attempts to persuade me to re-engage with the world of work, paid or otherwise. Naturally, while not in any way wishing to denigrate his own webbish labours (on behalf of that Force for Good, Tuppy Owens) I still fend him off as good-naturedly as I can:
I haven't spent a working lifetime in thrall to the Man and his stinking system just to get a job, you know. Work? I can sit and watch it all day. I draw any spare attention you have in the midst of your doubtless largely self-inflicted crisis mode to what Patrick McGeown had to say in his freelance article "The Wordster" in New Statesman magazine, 28 May 1965...
I like everything in this way of life for which I planned so long. I like my quiet room, my typewriter, my desk and the loneliness. The loneliness is especially dear to me after the noise of a steel-melting shop. And I like the little cheques. I remember reading many years ago of Cole Porter's first visit to London. A lady at dinner asked him, 'Which do you think of first, the lyric or the music?' 'The cheque,' answered Cole Porter.
Since I get a regular little virtual cheque from IBM I don't even have to think about that! I can just sit back, relax, and listen to my tum gurgling in counterpoint to the "64 masterpieces" I downloaded last Sunday for £2-59 of Johnny Hodges and his lovely alto sax playing.
Marketing
Now why would tobacco companies in Australia oppose "plain packaging" of their thoroughly nasty products — the stuff they have known, since 1951, causes (among other delights) the sort of lung cancer that killed my father? Beats me. (Though the fact that "biological leakage" is one of their euphemisms for the deaths among their users that have to be made good by marketing-driven "new recruits" could be a clue.)
And speaking of that dubious endeavour (marketing) — or, as I prefer to think of it, "lying" — if you're downunder but looking up you can now see the following highly-decorated Boeing 777:
Unless it's wearing Sauron's ring, of course. Thanks for the pic, Big Bro.
Though it's yet...
... further evidence — as if I could possibly need any — of my ever-growing senile decrepitude, I've been vastly amused to spot many an old, familiar friend's face here. Indeed, one such3 (by the same George A Miller whom I mentioned here for his wonderful little 1956 essay on the number seven — now a footnote in a CIA document!) is right there on the "front" page. Pelicans (and Penguins, Peregrines, even Puffins) were always among my favourite literary birds and their steady acquisition helped account for the disappearance of a probably horrifying proportion of my 'spare' cash4 over the last half a century.
The vicar of Old Windsor back in the 1970s was a delightfully interesting chap called Colin. I had many a fine 'discussion' with him over tea or coffee in his kitchen when I was lodging in one of his spare rooms shortly after I'd joined ICL and needed somewhere dry to lay my weary head at night. He'd never met a writer or programmer before and, to be honest, I'd never gone out of my way to get to know any vicars either.5 Anyway, Colin and Barbara visited us for an evening meal in our house a couple of years later, long after we'd moved out of the vicarage. He was struck by the large proportion of blue-coloured book spines on the shelves in the living room, and started to examine them before going on to ask that inevitable question "Have you read them all?"
Of course not, though all have been hefted, and some have been found wanting. Or even flung across the room in disgust :-)
If music be...
... the food of iTunes, I can now describe that program as well-fed and comfy in its new home. This is how it should have been on my iMac five years ago because then I might just have kept that gigantic white elephant iPod with its 24" screen. iTunes running on Windows is no longer quite the resource hog it used to be, and seems to have dragged pleasingly little extraneous Apple gorp in its wake. (I still neither know nor care to investigate what 'Bonjour' gets up to.) So, let's just see how long I keep it around this time. The "Mini Player" is tastefully minimal...
Compare and contrast the Windows Media Player of six years ago tackling exactly the same 'tune':
I have to admit that the charms of that shiny black lacquer window furniture have very largely worn off. Having more tightly controlled the MP3 importing — and discovered it doesn't like the taste of .wma files, nor that of FLACs — I've ended up with 41,726 "songs" loaded, which is enough to keep my auditory neural processing circuits occupied for 119.5 days, give or take. More, when allowing for time taken to make the odd cuppa, of course.