2013 — 15 September: Sunday

So much music, so little time. A late start to the day as my "catch up on missing sleep" autopilot kicked in for a full nine hours. Now, about that cuppa...

I woke up with an interesting thought for a useful bit of artwork / graphics program function and a suspicion that — if I dig deep enough — I may well find it already implemented in the Gimp. And a need (now satisfied) to snaffle last night's "Freakier Zone" to hear again a re-implementation of a bit of audio trickery1 I'd tried myself, long ago (1973), when I first had two tape recorders simultaneously at my disposal.

A passing thought...

... from Don Black, that he attributed to Quincy Jones: "You are your thoughts, man, you are your thoughts". (I do recommend Cerys Matthews.)

I was never...

... entirely comfortable in the workplace over many years (and Christa even less so; doubtless why she was happiest working from home for her last decade of life). There's an interesting pop-psychology piece — "Living with anxiety" — in today's "Observer" though I actually found one of the comments it's attracted rather more illuminating:

My panic attacks and anxiety were situational. I helped fight an unfair dismissal disguised as a 'restructure'. I saw, firsthand, horrific levels of bullying, deceit and unethical behaviour — even from so-called impartial agencies. Rules were twisted to serve the management agenda.
Why did I start to panic? Because it became Kafkaesque. One would assume that Human Resources would behave in a fair and transparent manner. Not so. The union was powerless and gagging orders were imposed.

'blowsabella' in Observer


It prompted me to pick up Robert Greene's book "The 48 Laws of Power" again after a decade away from it... my "Bell's Bookshop" bookmark in it was at Law #18. Proof, I suppose, that though I'd been finding it interesting, I'd not found it compelling. And I've already revealed what Christa thought about the topic:

Rules

If you follow the link, the reward is a lovely picture of my Best Girl :-)

I was clearly paying...

... insufficient attention to the hourly news bulletin that just interrupted my music so, although I half-heard a UK politico soundbite glibly warning us of the dangers of "the wrong kind of (economic) recovery" did we (the public) not do, (or perhaps stop doing), whatever he'd been told to "spin"... I wasn't even sure which of the parties he represents. Nor am I sure (having just fruitlessly browsed the BBC web's 'business' and 'politics' sections in search of personal clarification [I won't say "enlightenment"]) I could care less.

Music is so much more intelligent than the average rentaquote UK politician rounded up on a Sunday afternoon to strut his tedious stuff. Heck! Even the chicken salad I propose to assemble in the next few minutes is more intelligent.

I must say, the weather...

... so far this afternoon (and, indeed, for all too much of yesterday) has been perfectly, miserably, dull and dreary. Even the central heating has been tentatively making its (welcome) presence felt. And to make things worse (thank you, planetary axial tilt!) it's all downhill, I suppose, between now and the ghastly festive spasm awaiting us at the end of the year, too. What a horrid thought. Grrr.

:-)

My mention of axial tilt triggered memories of an earlier mention I made of an Annenberg Project film "A Private Universe", but I decided to let Copernic finish a new round of its now much-simplified indexing before I invoked it to pinpoint what I sought by the simple process of typing "Harvard". And indeed the anecdote reflects very little glory on 30 out of 32 Harvard graduates back in 1989.

More Pi stuff

Junior has just drawn my attention (he's lucky I heard the incoming beep of the email as it arrived, as I was settling down to enjoy that "Copying Beethoven" film) to this.

  

Footnote

1  A variant of that old urban myth about a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy being sharper than the original. I bounced a piece of music back and forth between the two devices to see how many generations it took to degrade into audio chaos. I declared the experiment a success after about 20 re-dubs when I ended up with something that sounded not unlike Malcolm Cecil with his TONTO's expanding head band.