2013 — 9 June: Sunday
The BBC 6Music lady has just assured me1 that one of her further-flung listeners in NZ says it's a cold, rainy Sunday evening down there. It's a pleasantly-bright, quite sunny Sunday morning more locally. The price you pay for living on your head, heh, Big Bro?
Now, about that tea. It is, after all, already 09:29...
Oil Pump Desanguination...
... isn't a phrase I could have predicted I would ever use. Source and snippet:
Our biologists of course claimed credit for the pump oil change idea, for having used this kind of setup previously when sucking off liquor from cells in multi-well plates. But I am afraid the true origin of this oil change breakthrough is rather more disturbing. You see, my colleague is leaving for medical school in few weeks and in preparation, he has already taken the anatomy labs. As I was sucking out gallon [sic] of alarmingly dark rotten muck from my pump with his gadget, he calmly observed that the really good, top-of-the-line embalming machines can aspirate blood while at the same time pumping formaldehyde solution back into the empty veins: The happy operator just needs to correctly insert the inlet and outlet tubes into the still body, turn on the flush routine and wait until the aspirate finally starts coming out clear...
I feel I should alert the "Car Talk" lads on NPR to this technique. Though, with respect, wasn't the soldier in white (whom we first meet just three pages into the late Joseph Heller's sublime "Catch-22"2) fed and drained by a similar (albeit, gravity-fed) process?
The thing about...
... having a weirdly retentive content-associative memory that free-wheels for much of the time is that, having just (on a whim) relocated my Joseph Heller hardback collection downstairs my eye was caught by this:
And I've just reminded myself of something I'd read in it about the Watsons of IBM long, long before I bowed to the inevitable (in 1981) and signed on with them:
The Watson family of IBM is among the best-heeled in the world, once worth an estimated $400 million in IBM stock: and not counting what is left from the founding Watson's salary, which was running at $1,000 a day back in 1934. Yet Tom Watson Jr, though by no means the most avaricious or self-assertive of tycoons, didn't say, when the stock options were being slung around, "count me out, fellows, I've got enough already." No: he dipped his fingers in the bran tub and came up with a paper profit, on exercising the option — to take one year as an example — of $1.9 million. (For which he'd paid $357,000.)
Time for my stale crust and a rind of furry cheese for lunch, methinks. [Pause] Or, at least, West Highland wild venison stew. [Pause] Then, almost before I know it, John Cooper Clarke's just wound down his two-hour guest slot in Jarvis Cocker's seat. Amazing. And the sun is still shining, too. Should I happen still to be awake at 03:00 tomorrow morning, I could even catch Richard Thompson and a "Peel session" from Shawn Phillips. Now that's a blast from the past and no mistake. Odd that I should have just leafed past my CD compilation of his work while on A&M.
Who — having once heard "Victoria Emmanuele" — could possibly forget it? :-)
Also odd that I should...
... have mentioned the late Iain Banks a mere 2,410 days ago, I suppose. As I said, I keep trying to like his "Culture" SF, but without success. Peter has a different opinion.
Guess where I've just been browsing...
Unsuccessfully, it seems.