2013 — 24 August: Saturday
Apparently, we're now saving on average £88 per month1 each, and native bees are helping to save the apple orchards of New York. Quite how BBC radio news items "make the cut" during the editorial process and during the (now, I suspect, continuous) silly season baffles me.
Meanwhile, I still...
... rate Jenny Diski more highly than the magazine (that I subscribed to for many years) in which I found her this morning. I was actually still thinking about the about-to-retire Mr Ballmer, whose 'shock' decision boosted not only his company's share price but also his own personal pension pot to the tune of an extra $1,000,000,000 or so in a single day:
Driving ambition might just be a way of staving off the vacuum, rather than a sign of bottomless greed for more when you have enough. An unquenchable passion for work might be a panic-stricken way of concealing the fear of a lack of passion for life itself. If you are what you do, what are you when you stop doing it and you still are? There are people who don't find this a problem, who have not entirely or even at all identified existence with what they do and how they make a living, but they are evidently a great problem to those — the majority — who do.
Speaking as a life-long aimless poor-but-happy potterer, I can but agree.
Yummy
It's been a year or two since I last enjoyed my little crop of home-grown red gooseberries. I must say they've just made a delicious alternative stewed topping for my cereal. Even tastier than the blackberries.
Young Mr Postie...
... (they're all young these days, of course) dropped off my DVD copy of that documentary about the toxic state of the Texas State Board of Education2 I'd spotted on Schrodinger's 126th birthday. Whether it will induce peaceful, dreamless sleep later this evening remains to be seen.
Huge sigh of relief
I couldn't resist the temptation to pop the DVD into BlackBeast. And I'd only been playing it for a couple of minutes before concluding the remarkably charm-free chairman (Don McLeroy) appears to be dangerously influential. [Pause] Aah, but wait! It seems, that should now be "appeared to be". And although I can't watch the man self-destruct on the "Colbert Report"...
... that little word "Former" as a prefix to his job description suggests he's now been laughed out of town. Nor need I go to the bother of spoofing my TCP/IP address to watch the "Colbert" video because Bad Astronomy assures me that this same video clip appears at some point further into the "Revisionaries" did I only have the patience to watch my DVD for a bit longer. Deep Joy!
I shall celebrate with another cuppa, and maybe a spot of lunch, before I cerebrate any further.
Well (having now finished watching the whole horribly-gripping thing) all I can say is that there were only fragments from the Colbert Report. But it was every bit as fascinating as the hypnotic 'Kaa' the python in the Disney version of Kipling's "Jungle Book". And a great deal more worrying.
I confess I was irresistibly reminded of Heinlein's 1939 story "If this goes on..." — but not in a good way. The religious dictatorship Heinlein imagined and described as ruling North America is now less than a century away, after all. That's just a few more publishing cycles of ignorant Texas school books.
"Give me the boy until he is seven... and I will give you the man." (In Texas it takes slightly longer, it seems.)
After a tasty...
... curry, my evening entertainment has been to re-watch "The Abyss". The novel of this that was constructed by Orson Scott Card from Cameron's screenplay is about the best I've read; most screenplays turn into lousy books — and many turn into lousy films, for that matter. "Star Wars", anyone?