2013 — 12 April: Friday
Less of an April shower, more like continuous dull drizzle.1 I shall sup my cup and ponder my day's non-existent agenda. Actually, it's a while since I explored Soton... Meanwhile there's a lovely bit of Schubert to be enjoyed. Piano Trio #2 in Eb D929 (though not the "sevond" movement as was suggested on the BBC web schedule's tickertape). A cardinal sin for such an ordinal number?
And now a shaft of sunlight. Excellent.
One could be...
... tempted to ask, at the conclusion of the long, but amazingly (and entertainingly) discursive, essay here, just what the Dickens is going on? Or exactly who is being fooled, and why?
The last time I mentioned John Tusa it was after having read his new alphabet of the arts (including "J" for "Jobsworth") a little over six years ago. Today, he's cropped up as the BBC Radio 3 studio guest making a case for the democratic and populist nature of opera. As I'm such a Philistine, I (still) don't buy it. Incidentally, was he "Sir John" back in 2007?
Which is the darker...
... cloud on my immediate local horizon? The blustering by North America's John Kerry in South Korea about the unacceptability of North Korea as a nuclear power, perhaps? Or is it the extra 6,000,000,000 Euros bailout now needed by Cyprus? Maybe, just maybe, it would be the fact that I maligned iTunes last December? The only reason it couldn't find "Scott sings Jacques Brel" was, of course, a simple and inescapable consequence of somebody's failure to rip that CD to MP3 files at the time somebody bought it. One year ago today. In the basement of HMV. Dammit.
Now that I've enjoyed my hot little quiche tartlet and salad lunch I shall have to have a quiet word with somebody. And [after a suitable pause for digestion] it's time to go and have a quiet word with somebody else. With luck I shall dodge the heaviest of the showers. And/or get a cleaner car.
Something...
... doesn't quite add up. The current issue of "Private Eye" (which, obviously, I venerate) contains as one of its "Funny Old World" items the suggestion that the correct number of the Beast is not 666 but a mere 616. That's a helluva typo to come echoing down the ages. And a story that even casual research seems to date from May 2005. I wonder if Aphrodite's Child will be re-issuing their double album under a revised title.
Meanwhile, never let it be said that the State Pension bit of our blessed guvmint doesn't cover all its bases:
Come on. Who knew we have a Gender Recognition Panel?