2013 — 4 October: Friday

No need for Noah's Ark so far this morning, though it looks dull and grey out there. (Mind you, I probably look dull and grey in here.) I'm listening1 to NPR's depressing tales of "shadow banking" and spreading criminality in the new, improved China. Between that and "Private Eye" I'm tempted to ask "Bring me somebody honest" just for the novelty value.

Baby Blue

I currently have (and am now listening to) precisely one track by "Badfinger" — Come and get it. It isn't the one mentioned in the interesting article on TV show music here but I may yet investigate further. However, I admit that (despite being able to deduce the topic of an earlier piece of NPR "cultural chat" yesterday) I found myself unable to enjoy, and thus unable to finish watching, even just the first season of "Breaking Bad" (ordered sight unseen almost exactly four years ago) despite its interesting premise.

I am increasingly out of sympathy with the idea of criminality as entertainment, wholesome or otherwise. I couldn't even be bothered to watch the final half dozen episodes of "The Sopranos", despite having watched all the preceding episodes.

I prefer vampires! Bite me :-)

I'm shocked...

... I tell you, shocked, to learn that the UK can possibly be home to a popular, populist, daily newspaper that has been branded thus:

Daily Mail

Actually, I've mentioned my opinion of this "newspaper" — a hateful rag — before :-)

Having just...

... got the round tuit needed to open dear Mama's most recent batch of redirected snailmail, I'm amused (somewhat) to note that the tiny bit of annual pension she still collects from my late father's long-since-defunct company scheme has just been nudged upward to the point where it (very slightly) exceeds my starting annual salary at ICL back in February 1974. It wouldn't even pay for two weeks of her present care-home fees...

After the concentrated...

... but very enjoyable doses of Strauss (R), Schubert (F), Barber (S), Rachmaninov (SV) et al this afternoon, it's something of an audio relief to accept a recommendation from Jeff Bezos and download a copy of (lest you can't quite decipher the tiny vertical line of print down the right hand side) "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun":

Dead Can Dance MP3s

A title that can only remind me of the pre-Narnian Queen Jadis and her own, ancient realm. It's not, I admit, a Dead Can Dance album I've ever heard before. But the samples intrigued me. On with the show! And the kettle.

Riddle me this, all you...

... oh-so-clever Tablet PC makers, with your oh-so-clever touchscreens: how do you stop them getting smeared, particularly if you've just happened to eat an innocent little scrap of greasy junk food? (Not that I ever would, of course.) Clue: that little batch of microfibre cloths and the "Noodle Mitt" I picked up two months ago. Utterly brilliant!

Riddle me this, too. Schubert wrote over one thousand pieces of music before he died, aged 31, from the horrors of then-untreatable syphilis. I'm twice his age, and have never written a note. Thoughts prompted by listening to that Eric Dolphy album "Out to Lunch". It was recorded in 1964, just a couple of months before Dolphy died in Berlin (after lapsing into a diabetic coma that went unrecognised) aged just 36.

The recent death...

... of a very popular, and extremely successful, author prompts this reminder of one reason to continue to avoid his books:

'The last chance to stop the operation had passed by. The die was now cast, if not yet thrown.'
Tom Clancy in Debt of Honor, 1994

Ansible #171


Incoherent word salad?

It seems US politicians can be just as inarticulate as our own home-grown variety. (Proof.)

  

Footnote

1  Was listening; as soon as they switched topic to the boosting of fashionable shoe sales by the TV show "Sex in the City" I gave up (as usual) and retreated to BBC Radio 3's endless sequences of tinkling notes. I'm obviously crotchety.