2013 — 20 May: Monday
A moist morning1 for the 38th anniversary of my father's death. Listening (well, half-listening) to the country's top news stories provides only grim amusement. Why either a deeply hypocritical guvmint that dismisses its grass-roots activists as "swivel-eyed loons", or any of the various religious hierarchies mired in deeply hypocritical denial of the sexual antics of some of their "officers", deserves the attention given to their views simply baffles me. Neither has any business deciding who loves or lives with whom... ever. That's ridiculous.
"Keep calm and carry on."
Why did I ever...
... think owning so many CDs was a Good Thing? The email order acknowledgement I've just received from Cherry Red Records for the MOJO-commissioned new variant of Pink Floyd's 1979 masterpiece "The Wall" by a whole gang of musicians I've mostly never heard of illustrates my point, I suspect.
Meanwhile, it's a bit rich to ask (as BBC Radio proposes to, tomorrow evening) "Have recent stark warnings about antibiotic-resistant bugs come too late?" when that particular writing has clearly been on the unswabbed hospital wall (as it were) for the last several decades. A point I still remembering pondering2 myself back in 1985, in fact.
Not to mention every time from the mid-1980s onward that my GP would initially prescribe penicillin3 and doubtless became tired of hearing me say "No, I'm not allergic to it, but nor are the bacteria that I tend to attract that love to cause what you can no longer diagnose as 'tonsillitis' since I had the damned things excised in 1976." (I would either be given some variant on the spot, or [more often] would have to return a week later for an alternative prescription.)
I'd certainly vote...
... for Gisela Stuart! I enjoyed her take on "schadenfreude" — a German word for an English concept. (More.)
There comes a time when — in my never-ending struggles with entropy — I'm driven to the expedient of buying a few more garbage bags. I was, of course, convinced I still had a roll of the things somewhere (buried, I suspect, under a pile of entropy) but it occurs to me that any such item dates to the distant days of Christa and, in any case, has probably taken up residence in Junior's place several years ago. So it's now off to the tip with me. Preferably before the clouds unleash whatever they're obviously holding on to in the hydrated oxygen line.
Some things...
... just don't know how to stop!
What would Grace Hopper say?
Do Androids dream...
... of digital sheep? One of my lost sheep has just stumbled, blinking, into the light. Or at least, given it's now 20:35, the twilight. The errant lamb was Laurie Anderson's 2001 CD "Life on a string". Somehow I'd managed to tuck it into a double CD case alongside her 1984 CD "Mr Heartbreak". Somehow I'd also lazily failed to find the round tuit needed to produce a new typeset CD label for it at the time. Baaa!
Another rather older, but not quite so lost, friend turned up. I bought a K-Tel "Best of" compilation of the 'Sensational' Alex Harvey Band from Boots, in St. Peter Port, Guernsey, in August 1987 — escaping V.A.T. quite legally:
We'd taken Peter out with us and were trying quite hard to shield him from news reports of the dreadful Hungerford Massacre.
R.I.P. Ray Manzarek
And another one leaves the building. <Sigh>