2013 — 31 March: Sunday

I don't know¹ what Christ's "seven last words on the cross" were — WTF? Get me down! Now!!! strikes me as a plausible candidate phrase — but I do now know that they make for a dreary piece of Handel. That's BBC Radio 3 for you on Easter egg morning. My own fault for leaving it tuned to that station.

It's bad enough that the shared delusion that is UK society throws me out of bed an hour earlier today. Even if it means the angle of the sun² is less troublesome on my screens. [Pause] I need tea.

Remember that hysterical...

... scene in "Stardust" (the Robert De Niro 2007 version, not the 1974 one with David Essex) with Uncle Bob prancing around in female undergarb to Can Can music? One of my chums has just arrived, over five years late, to that particular party and mischievously assessed it as (and I quote) "the most horrific scene I have ever encountered in a Hollywood film". He goes on "I'm a tolerant guy and generally I think people should be free to do whatever pleases them but in this case I think I want to invoke the scaring the horses clause".

And you think you know a chap :-)

Having proved, though...

... only after considerable effort and some not very minor expense (two new Dell monitors, a couple of new leads, several adapter dongles) that I can overcome the "legacy ports" issue of my graphics card and drive my 60" Kuro plasma screen at the same time as my two 24" desktop screens, I've nevertheless just pulled out the hdmi lead from the back of BlackBeast for the last time. Why? Several reasons:

I'm fed up with losing windows from my right hand desktop into the 'black hole' of a switched-off plasma. Quite why Win8Pro does this to a subset of my applications, and only ever from the right hand screen, completely baffles me. Obviously never tested in Seattle, or wherever Windows code is carelessly thrown together these days.
I'm fed up with trying to get 1920x1080 images to actually fill the plasma screen's available real estate, and have no clue where the unwanted scaling is taking place — this is the opposite problem from the Android Tablet PC, which invariably clips the edges of the image.
I'm annoyed that I can't persuade the hdmi lead to carry audio alongside video, necessitating a separate optical digital lead from BlackBeast and concomitant input switching at the pre-amp (which, in turn, often provokes the irritations of point #1 a few minutes later).
I'm delighted with the performance of the tiny WD HD TV streamer / media player that has now rendered the direct PC-to-Kuro connection superfluous except in the case of playing a 10-bit mkv video file, I'm reliably informed. VLC can handle these (as can the Miro player that I had one of my software mineshaft canaries test for me) but not the little WD wonder box.

I remain unconvinced by the mythical merging of TV and networked PC in the living room. [Pause] Breakfast? Yes, about time.

A case could be made...

... for leaving my two-CD set of the complete Nocturnes by Chopin (Idil Biret, piano) on permanent repeat play, I suspect. I got tired of BBC 6Music going more or less all-Bowie on me. It's 12:23 but my tum doesn't yet agree on any need for lunch. I agree with it.

Laughter is, indeed...

... the best medicine, and a powerful force for good. In fact I've just had to put down my book until my tears of helpless laughter stopped and let me focus again. It set me thinking. There are just three books³ so far that have had this effect on me as an adult:

Catch-22, the first 60 pages of which reduced me to helpless tears in a hospital bed while under the influence of a 'pre-med' injection designed to knock me out before I was permanently parted from my rotten tonsils in April 1976. The nurses eventually confiscated it.
The Edwardian thunder-box episode in Evelyn Waugh's Men at Arms, which reduced me to helpless tears in bed while under the influence of a fever of 104F induced by the bacterial pneumonia that very nearly killed both me and Christa in March 1991.
The beautifully-described ineptly-convoluted machinations of Miles' courtship of the widow Ekaterin in Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign, as mentioned yesterday. (Heavily influenced by Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and none the worse for that.) This being the present cause of my pause.

Tea? Yes, why not?

The downloaded music...

... treats I often, erm, treat myself with on a Sunday generally arise from material played by Cerys Matthews in the morning. Not so, tonight's. It's (nearly) all Stuart Maconie's fault this time:

He played a Scott Walker track I didn't know, from an album I was unaware of. And he played enough from David Bowie's album "Low" to convince me to add it to the Philip Glass "Low" Symphony I already have on CD. But "Songs for Tibet"? That was because I idly asked for a Rupert Hine listing of downloadable material and found precisely one track I didn't already have... on this compilation album. Simple, really.

More nutritious than an Easter egg.

Footnotes

¹  And have no intention of researching.
²  Currently shedding fresh light on what could be called the less-dusted areas of my little bit of Lebensraum.
³  Leaving to one side both my childhood readings of "Three Men in a Boat" and the pleasure I always got from watching my son reading the annual copies we received from Big Bro of the NZ cartoon "Footrot Flats" which could be relied on to crease him up. (When we took him to see a Disney film that was preceded by one of the "Roger Rabbit" cartoons, his fits of seat-shaking laughter during that provoked more mirth in the local audience than any of the subsequent on-screen antics.) Can't think where he gets it from :-)