2013 — 6 February: Wednesday
So "where", he asks, tempting fate1 "is all that promised snow?" As I sniffed the air on my front porch this morning my trusty wall-mounted German technology insisted it was already +3C. Mind you, the thick clouds are scudding briskly along from an unusual point of the compass. On with the show.
Hello, pension. Nice to see you... and 20p more than last month? Excellent!
I note, though not...
... with great pleasure, that my visit to an online bank this morning seems2 to have left its simple-minded mandatory "security" software blocking the useful Win8 "Snipping Tool" that makes it so easy to capture bits of my desktop content. But there are ways around it. Speaking of tools, this comment made me smile more than the article it's attached to:
Healthy, or what?
National radio news is having quite a heavyweight "go" at the NHS in exactly the same way that "Private Eye" has steadily been doing for several years. You cannot "inspect" or "audit" quality into such a system. But, as usual, what gets measured by 'da management' is what gets attention paid to it.
Delicious blue sky, bright sunshine, chilly breeze... positively early Spring-like. [Pause] Followed quickly, I notice — as I start prepping my next crockpot of nutritional delights — by clouds and a marked diminution of brightness. See below re perversity.
I must be...
... really stupid. I simply don't understand why, if "we" now own 81% of the taxpayer-bailed-out Royal Bank of Scotland, "we" can't actually tell it what to do. In this case, tell it to pay its various fines out of its bonus pot rather than its operating profits. My residual affection for the bank that allowed me to clear our mortgage years early, thus saving many thousands of pounds in interest, has evaporated.
I always liked...
... hearing what new "goodies" the late BBC Radio DJ Charlie Gillett managed to find from around the world to fill his annual "World" music compilations. They generally made far more interesting listening than any mainstream commercial station's playlist. This new one — When the world was young — delivered today...
... has been dedicated to his memory, which is a nice touch. It consists of 26 tracks from the 1980s. And it kicks off with the weirdly compelling "Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares". No home should be without it :-)
Later
Well, even if I say so myself (and there's no-one else here to contradict me, after all) that was a very yummy crockpot, and hit the spot nicely. A fresh cuppa should finish things even more nicely. But first things first, the dishes. Then I shall have to see if I can't find some moving pixels streamed from a spinning disc.
Later still
Or, better yet, a randomly-shuffled set of music tracks. After all, with a mere 44,678 to choose from (yes! I've finally finished combing through all the duplicates and mis-meta-tagged MP3s) I have about 127 days of listening, 24 x 7, before things get repetitive. This could take a while...