2013 — 5 April: Friday
I'm long back from an early supplies run1 out in what feels remarkably like a re-run of yesterday's nasty cold 'snap'. On with the show. I think today is going to be well-suited to the proverbial curling up with a good book in front of the fire. One out of two ain't too bad.
I was interested to learn, in one of Lois McMaster Bujold's delightful essays, that she'd been told the worst real-life crimes (in the sense of the heavy-duty, blood on the walls, cleanup required afterwards — as depicted in the excellent film "Sunshine Cleaning") never occur in houses filled with books. But then I simply can't imagine2 a house not filled with books. What would be the fun in that?
I actually subscribed...
... to Time magazine for a year, back in 1968. That was quite enough for me, thanks very much. It took nearly a decade for the Marketing Department to conclude that I really had lost any further interest, even at a 65% discount. I was completely unaware of the journalistic production process outlined here. Source and snippet:
By the time I was working in Time Edit, just about all that remained of the style Gibbs had lampooned was the use of phrases like "says he" or "said she" to introduce a quotation, plus a number of constructions that must have grown out of the pressure Time writers were under to write as compactly as possible — saving a few words by referring to the writer of a new novel, for instance, as "gap-toothed author Smith." (In the eighties, Spy magazine, both of whose founding editors had been writers at Time, paid a sort of homage to those leftover tics by using phrases like "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump.") It was largely because of the constant pressure to compress that Time prose struck me as more difficult to write than to parody.
Speaking of parody...
... were I to look hard enough upstairs in the books warehouse, I'm reasonably sure I could still find my copy of Harvard Lampoon's parody issue of "Time" that I bought in December 1969. By then, I'd absorbed enough of the style to appreciate the wit and skill on display. It was ten shillings — an outrageous amount for a young apprentice aeronautical engineer to spend in light of the size of my pay packet back in those days. As I've remarked before... some might think that being able to lay one's hands on one's first-ever (pre-decimal) payslip as a 17 year old in September 1969 is perhaps carrying the art of the squirrel a step or so too far.
By December that year, my basic pay had shot up to £6 7/6d by the simple process of (my) becoming 18.
I think I may...
... dip my televisual toe into the new series of HIGNFY in about 15 minutes from now, though there doesn't seem to have been much scope for humour in the news so far this week. I'd noticed the new series while I was snaffling a cuppa over with Roger & Eileen this afternoon. Having teased Roger yet again about his pressing need to obtain a new, large, flat-screen TV I was then leafing through the past week of programmes shown in their 'Radio Times' — and finding almost nothing to detain me.
I wonder which of the seven glossy new social classes that opinion assigns me to. Boring old fart, I expect. So bite me.