2013 — 1 September: Sunday — rabbits!
Definitely speeding towards autumnal1 as I contemplate those emails that I've yet to answer, sup the first cup, and ponder the stupidity / cupidity of a film studio that fails to make available subtitle tracks on Blu-rays that were available (in abundance) on earlier NTSC DVDs of the same film. Yet another misguided (cretinous?) Hollywood marketing exec decision, no doubt.
Meanwhile, I fear...
... I have done one of my chums no favours. I was browsing through an extensive set of book titles — more or less randomly, my eyes glazing over somewhat as it was quite late and "extensive" in this case means "in excess of 20,000" — when my nascent psychic proof-reading talent warned me too late of a mangled spelling as I'd already completed a hypercyberspatial jump to another stretch of titles. Alas (like the hapless victims in Asimov's 1962 "Star Light") when emerging back into normal space I was hopelessly Lost2 in Space when it came to retracing my jump. "Danger, Will Robinson."
Time for breakfast while I draft one of those email replies. And note the first search entry in my server log this month:
the fermi paradox self-replicating probes and the interstellar transportation bandwidth
Sounds like I'm not the only one lost in space this morning. How very, erm, coincidental. Odd.
Somewhat later
It will soon be time for my evening meal, but at least I've made some progress on a backlog or three. Or four. I was asked today if I was "on" FaceBook. And separately how come it had taken me so long to tiptoe into the world of Android smart phones. I have now developed a general purpose reply, though who knows how much longer the barbarians can be kept outside the gates of Technology Towers? :-)
I truly despise mobile phones almost as much as I despise the people I now see all around me who keep themselves permanently glued to the things. And I really despise the 24x7 constant contact silliness. As for the plethora of (in my view sociopathically scary, if not downright sinister and creepy) social networking technology... mega-yuk. The late John Brunner in that fantastic quartet of novels "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Jagged Orbit" and "The Sheep look up" and — particularly — in "Shockwave Rider" was remarkably prescient back in the late 60s and early to mid 70s in extrapolating undesirable societal consequences of the technology in which I plied my trade.
How have I...
... managed to survive adult life for 36 years without owning my own copy of that 1977 masterpiece "Aja" by Steely Dan? On CD, that is? I have a minidisc copy of it that I dubbed from a cassette that I dubbed from my original vinyl (mild OCD, remember?) but, given the care Becker and Fagen put into these recordings, that hardly counts, does it?
Amazon and Auto-Rip to the rescue for not much more than a fiver.
I still like...
... minidiscs. They're extremely convenient, after all. This one holds 297 minutes of music:
I'm currently listening to that venerable Tangerine Dream soundtrack (from the Michael Mann film, starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld) for the first time in all too long a time. Next thing you know I'll be watching my DVD of it again... And "Floating Music", of course, was used on "The Man Who Fell to Earth". I fairly recently (five years ago, almost to the day) succumbed to quite an expensive Japanese imported CD to re-acquaint myself with Stomu Yamash'ta — a mighty fine percussionist — in better quality sound.
It boggles my mind somewhat to see that just this one minidisc manages to encompass music albums I'd accumulated between 1972 and 1992. Where the hell does all that slippery Time disappear?