2013 — 5 September: Thursday
My little blue Yaris awaits1 out on the drive, and I can now turn my faltering attention to things like, say, a morning cuppa. As I checked through the service history I was a little dismayed to discover that — technically — its test certificate expired yesterday. Annoying when the car was first registered on 8th October 2007. This date has been allowed to drift steadily earlier, so my conscience feels remarkably clear.
It's clear...
... reading the fascinating piece here that I've thought a lot less deeply about "genius" than some people. Source and snippet:
I have met six Nobel Prize winners, and none has come close, in my view, to qualifying as a genius... The last won his Nobel Prize for literature, and the most profound thing about him was
the extent to which he had screwed up his personal life. Somehow it is always sensible to remember that in 1949 the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese
surgeon, for developing the procedure known as the lobotomy.
Genius is rare. Schopenhauer thought a genius was one in a hundred million. In this realm if in no other, that most pessimistic of philosophers may have been optimistic.
Meanwhile, at 10:15 my Yaris has just made its way up the hill without me. A very odd sensation.
How very casually...
... our beloved guvmint feels able to carry on its tradition of writing off huge wodges of my money on their consistent large-scale I.T. project failures. If I didn't know any better, I might soon almost start to begin to be tempted to believe that Whitehall knows even less about computing than I do. (Link.)
Well, the initial phone call from Toyota has mentioned only a need to top up the brake fluid. I wonder what else they will find?
I await...
... my afternoon visitor in glorious sunshine, though my morning coffee companion assured me it's going to rain buckets tomorrow. Actually, the BBC feather warcast tends to agree with him. I still have to go out in it, whatever the weather. Daren't disappoint Dr Fang.
I'm now re-united with my little blue flivver, which apparently had little or nothing wrong with it and is jolly nearly as clean now as the day it was delivered. Wonder how long that will last :-)
Next excitement? If the Tom Cruise DVD Len has lent me ("Jack Reacher") fails to thrill, I shall have to rely on tomorrow afternoon's session with Dr Fang. Can wait.
Or the over-sized spider I've just found lurking at the edge of the hallway overlay while I, once again, tried to align it (not the spider!) parallel to one of the walls. I bet if spiders had a sense of humour as well as a ghastly superfluity of hairy legs they'd be quite amused at the degree of fear and loathing they can inspire... in me, at least. I am by some way not an arachnophiliac, and have long been so. (Evidence from Christmas 1986.)
I forgot...
... to check earlier, when I was putting the strangely-clean car back into its nest, but I'm given to understand that (for the first time in nearly six years) its dashboard clock now shows the correct time rather than a near approximation varying by an hour or so whenever Daylight Saving (or its fancy new name) kicked in or out. At least I didn't forget to remove the radio aerial before mangling it in the garage door. What I did check was my mileage in the last 12 months — a mere 4,543 which is quite a lot less than in earlier years. It occurs to me that this is also progress of a sort, since I would often take myself out for a drive simply to cheer myself up.