2013 — 24 April: Wednesday
One of the extras on last night's "A Room with a View" was an excellent 26-minute BBC obituary (originally broadcast on 14 July 1970) of EM Forster featuring inter alia Lord Annan, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, Richard Marquand1 and Christopher Isherwood all expertly stitched together by a chap I'd never heard of (James Mossman). It stood in stark (and fascinating) intellectual contrast to the more recognisably-modern style of clips from a couple of BBC breakfast chat shows of 1986 in which Simon Callow and Daniel Day-Lewis were clearly trotting around on the "film promotion" sofa interview circuit. Since I didn't have any access to TV in 1970, and have never got into the habit of watching any breakfast shows, I was — like Oliver Sacks' anthropologist from Mars — rivetted.
I do not believe in Belief, but this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules and science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp.
Rather prescient words, I thought, from a wartime essay by Forster called "What I believe." [Pause] On with my own breakfast show. It's distinctly cooler this morning, so far...
Monsieur Le Crockpot is stuffed, and embarked on his next thermal journey. The wheelie bin guys have, erm, bin and gone. And I'm listening to an interesting account of the Panama Canal. They're building new, bigger, locks for new, bigger, ships. A lock 2km long (in a seismic area) is quite a proposition. (Link.)
My OCR software...
... is doing its best to convince me my PC is not a finite state machine. While scanning my CD artwork, I generally try to use the track listings as printed on the sleeve. Occasionally2 these are printed either stupidly small, or in stupid colours, or both, or using stupid fonts, or too stupidly well-concealed among a thicket of 'arty' graphics that the text is basically illegible. (I am not now, nor ever was, a fan of the "New Typography". I regard it with the same low regard I have for almost all the punk music that originated at much the same time.)
"Plan B" in such cases uses Windows Explorer to list the "Details" view of the tracks from my MP3 rips3 then the "Snipping Tool" to capture this and save temporarily as a Jpeg for feeding straight to my trusty Omnipage 18 to turn into simple ASCII text for importing into my Xara graphics program. Simple enough for almost any child of five years or more these days, I fear.
About half the times I have to use "Plan B", Omnipage eats the digit "5" of the track number and turns it into the letter "S". Short of increasing the size of my entire desktop system fonts to give it a few more pixels to analyse, I don't see any way round this charmless glitch.
Suddenly...
... it's time to rein in the crockpot's journey, before the culinary perfection of my evening meal is — as it were — overshot. When I went out into the back garden earlier this afternoon to retrieve a doll flung over the fence by the young lady next door I noticed my tulips are finally all coming out to play. The ground is pretty well covered by primroses, too. They evidently self seed. Or self root. Or whatever the technical term for "spread like weeds" is. The ornamental cherry is blossoming, as is the pear tree. Even the vine is slowly waking up. It's becoming a fecund jungle out there once again, Christa!
Narrow escape
Having spotted in the small print the fact that my Spanish Bank was about to start taking a regular lump out of my account unless I pay in a regular lump each month I've just cunningly drained the dregs and boosted them over to my non-Spanish Bank. Now all I have to do is remember to tell them to close the account before the end of April. Such good fun.