2013 — 16 September: Monday
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night,
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight.
And all that. Now, about that cuppa... [Pause] By the way, any reader unfamiliar (is that even possible?) with the wonderful Rubaiyat can re-trace my own unconventional (some
might even say 'pornographic') route to it as described here. :-)
For once1 I find I've been driven away from BBC Radio 3 by the witterings of the presenter. I expect a higher music to noise ratio.
Young Guy Garvey...
... cost me a ton of money and a lump of broadband yesterday evening. He played, and I was captivated by, a Nick Cave track — "Red right hand" — that (can you believe?) I didn't have in my little stash. So off I trickled to that larger-capacity stash in the Cloud owned by Jeff Bezos. It turned out that particular track is on a couple of albums, so I opted for one of them at random: a sort-of best-of compilation ("The Best of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds") but (naturally, given the perversity of the Universe) that particular CD wasn't offering Auto-Rip so I bought a six-minute version of the track as a separate 79p download.
But, by then, the rot had set in as I'd also found a new Nick Cave album ("Push the Sky Away") that was offering Auto-Rip and (more damagingly) was part of their current "Two CDs for £15" offer. Worse was to come. Searching through the other titles in that list I found a new-ish Rod Stewart album ("Time") also offering Auto-Rip. Into the basket with it.
Dagnabbit. But at least I remembered to click on Free Delivery. Good music, though, I hafta admit.
I've yet to...
... figure out why Copernic is so keen to re-index my web browser history each morning. Not that I mind, but in doing so it drives the main data drive to near-as-dammit 100% and seems to soak up around 15% CPU. I suspect that's some indication of a bottleneck on or around either the disk itself or the SATA III controller on my particular motherboard. These flecks of spinning rust are the weakest link after you've crashed through the 2.1TB limit, it seems.
It's nearly 20 years...
... since I laboriously crafted my own version of this punctuation mark:
... for my use in the 2nd edition of my light-hearted "Chronicle of CICS". How things change.
The last time...
... I saw the chap on the left, here, (Mads Mikkelsen) he was portraying Hannibal Lecter, of all people. I hope I get on better with this Danish production than I did with the rather insipidly-scripted "Copying Beethoven":
And, although the space devoted (on the back cover of this replacement Blu-ray of the Austen title) to telling me all about the utterly unwanted 'Ultraviolet' version I now have until 15 April 2015 to stream and download also carefully assures me — in eye-wateringly small print — that the 'special features' of this re-issue are not included... there's not one word about what those features actually are. Curious marketing strategy.
Unbelievable!
How can "The Chain" possibly have reached record #3948 before Marvin Gaye's "I heard it thru the grapevine" finally gets picked? Astonishing!
Sheer lunacy
I've just caught sight of the moon while wearing my Varifocus glasses, so saw it clearly. I still have absolutely no idea how anyone could ever talk about seeing a face on its surface though, as often happens, I stared at it while remembering doing so from a hot beach on the Med in July 1969 during the first moon landing. What I wouldn't give to have been there and done that!