2013 — 17 June: Monday
Still not very summery1 as I listen to Harry Shearer's "Le Show", which is featuring a skit on Director of National Intelligence (and how's that for a job title?) James Clapper's "Least untruthful" response to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing three months ago when asked "Does the NSA gather any type of data at all on millions of Americans?"
In case you missed this gem, he'd said "No, sir. Not wittingly." (Link.)
Sadly, I missed the item in "The Sun" for which Mr Murdoch has now had to apologise to the Church of Scientology. Seems there weren't alien spacecraft flying over the Church after all. Pity.
I don't have...
... much spare time, and then I find this. It has some BBC material, too.
A little clipping...
... that fluttered out of the pile I was tidying up from the reading-room floor yesterday. Its genesis should be fairly obvious, if only to the Arnold fans of the world:
I suggest it aligns neatly with the lamentations regarding the UK's political processes expressed (quite rightly) here by Tanya Gold.
I have my own...
... personal variant of "MTBF". In my case, it can also stand for "mean time between finding" when looking for something (usually a book). In this afternoon's case, it was a pleasing three minutes or so between re-reading the book review I'd clipped from "New Statesman" in March 2002 (another item from yesterday's entertaining pile) and locating the copy...
... I'd unaccountably failed to slip this clipping into when I bought the book that same month. Here's an excerpt — the reviewer was Nicholas Fearn:
This is the kind of book to be placed immediately among one's favourite curios. On the seldom-described physical act of reading, it is always acute. Spufford compares the privacy of reading a book to the experience of hanging around outside a police station while stoned, or of wearing a lace thong beneath your suit to the office: you may be outwardly solemn, but you are inwardly crazed. He is very good on the way we mispronounce words we learn through our reading, words we force ourselves to pronounce the public way, all the time believing that the proper pronunciation is our own. These quirks stay with us for ever, which means that malapropisms committed by the elderly may be a sign of memory's last fling, rather than a symptom of its demise.
I'm not sure a malapropism is quite the same thing as a mispronunciation, but it's a minor cavil.
Time...
... to go and blag a cuppa and a chat. [Pause] Well, I've no idea what was clogging up the traffic in both directions on Bournemouth road this afternoon, but it was still unusually busy a couple of hours later when I cunningly returned via some sneaky back-roads. Or is this simply what commuting entails every day? If so, it's ghastly.
Ever an optimist...
... I've refitted the second fan in BlackBeast in case it ever decides to become even vaguely summery2 this 'summer'. We shall see. Even quiet music from the other end of the living room is more than enough to mask any noise from the fans, which are both on their lowest speed settings. And the gigantic CPU cooler is essentially inaudible on its own, too.
Then again, BlackBeast is not exactly over-exerting itself right now.