2012 — 7 December: Friday
Unwicked Uncle ERNIE has decided to fling two of his tiny cheques in my direction just in time for the upcoming celebratory spasm. Cool.
Meanwhile, I know this is going to be almost impossible to believe in this enlightened age, but stay with me here. It seems staff in UK banks are under greater pressure than ever before to meet 'targets', the unpalatable result of which is that selling of inappropriate products1 is still being encouraged. Right here in River City. Golly. Of course, none of those staff surveyed by the jolly folk at "Which?" are themselves consciously mis-selling 'stuff' — oh, no, sir — but they all know colleagues who are... Upton Sinclair comes to mind:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary is dependent on his not understanding it...
Whenever you establish unregulated closed-group institutions staffed by the usual run of humanity, or set incentives that reward undesirable behaviour, you really shouldn't be surprised when unnatural acts occur, as they surely do in any non-zero-sized group of bankers, 'independent' financial advisors, share dealers, insurance sales staff, journalists, estate agents, Catholic priests. (Though you might think the priests, at least, would be wary of their all-seeing boss2 keeping a Sauron-like eye on them from time to time.)
I need some breakfast to raise the blood sugar level. It's bad enough waking up on a chilly Friday morning firmly convinced that it's Saturday. I want my marbles back :-)
Not that I'm...
... any kind of completeist / archivist, you understand, but there are some hopeful snippets buried in this news. Though, as a faithful BBC licence fee payer for all my adult life, I'll be a little bit ticked off if I end up having to pay again to buy stuff I've already paid for (as it were).
I know full well...
... that if you can't say something nice about a person, you shouldn't say anything at all. (One of numerous parental maxims I absorbed, but did my level best not to pass on to my son, for obvious reasons.) When it comes to the idiots who designed(?) and implemented(?) the lamentable, asinine, brain-dead, stupid, annoying, broken hdcp protocol, however... I have, once again, failed to persuade so much as a glimmer of life from my 60" Kuro plasma screen when trying to get my laptop PC to chat amiably to it. Nor, for that matter, any whisper of audio. Maddening.
Time for Plan B. Late lunch, preceded by a quick burst of shopping to obtain ingredients for same. [Pause]
Today's snail mail, including a card to Christa from Honda, prompted me to peer back into the mists of Time (at an email I sent to Carol) to remind myself exactly when we got rid of our third and final Honda:
... so I can get back to my world-class loafing regime tonight. After, that is, I have rendezvoused (gad sir, that word looks mighty odd) with my chauffeuse (I even have my doubts about that word) in her brand new, still running-in-the-engine, less than 200 miles on the clock, baby Mercedes A class — the one that was immediately withdrawn and expensively re-engineered (with the same electronic stabilisation as the way-out-of-our-league S class) after it failed the Scandinavian elk test a year or so back. We have finally fled the Honda camp, mostly through growing anger at the local dealer's vulturistic proclivities. It's ace! And although it's nearly a full metre shorter than the Civic, it feels just about the same size inside, and we sit a lot higher in it, too. You should see the looks...
So, 14 years whizz by and she still lives on in a Honda marketing database somewhere.
A Nora Ephron...
... film that I don't know also turned up:
As did an extremely informative leaflet about Norovirus, from dear Mama's care-home. Plus the inevitable next round of credit card bills, reminding me of a line from a song in "Evita" :-)
['nother pause]
Crikey, it feels horribly cold out there. I'm just back from a cuppa and a biccie with Roger & Eileen. It's dark, it's windy, and I've decided I really don't care much for this time of year. Time to catch-up with the rest of the weekly Kermode and Mayo film programme — I caught the first hour before I set off.
"Julie & Julia" is immensely entertaining.