2013 — 10 October: Thursday
NPR has been waffling.1 I've therefore felt forced to revert to the lesser waffle that is BBC Radio 3's classical choices. It will improve my mood for a spot of needful weekend supplies shopping (Peter and Peter's g/f will be here) sometime after breakfast but ahead of today's lunch date.
Meanwhile, my central heating system has been thermally nurturing the house upstairs, though the kernel of Technology Towers is a somewhat untoastier 20.1C as I keep my little living room window open — except during hurricanes and ice storms. I also keep the door behind me (to the kitchen) open which (a) enables me to hear the phone and thus all the cold calls from Mr Murdoch's Empire wondering why I don't want his ghastly "Sky" TV shows, and let's not forget those from the Indian subcontinent about PPI scams and similar infinite investment opportunities, and (b) assists the freezers to do their bit at shifting thermal energy around with less effect on my electricity consumption.
A tricky subject
What is it, do you think, that was defined thus in 1908?
[may] thus be finally defined as an intensely vivid complex of unsteady, ill-localized and ill-analyzed sensation, with attention distributed over the immediate sensory contents and the concomitant sensations reflexly evoked.
I had no idea it could be fatal.
My experience of...
... academia from the delivery end was limited to the sympathetic ear (and, on occasion, absorbent shoulder) I was called upon to offer for Christa's comfort during her sometimes bruising times in the German department of Royal Holloway College in the mid-1970s. By the time she re-entered the fray (briefly, in the early 1990s) in a large, highly-regarded local public (that is, fee-paying private) school in Soton she'd developed both a contempt for the staffroom shenanigans and a healthy set of calluses. Have things improved?
Like everyone else, I already knew that academia was populated by the kind of characters Lewis Carroll warned us about. There are the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillars, of course, and any
postgraduate knows that supervisors are like White Rabbits: always unavailable on account of some other undisclosed urgent deadline. But now I've started to realise that academia is in fact
an internally-coherent language world presided over by Humpty Dumpty, and that it doesn't work beyond the context of its rabbit-hole — and perhaps it is best that it doesn't...
In the strange world we call "real" there are people who shy from "deep" conversations, do unpaid internships, and communicate in a language of fatuous job titles and corporate jargon that
even the Mad Hatter couldn't have made up. All things considered, Wonderland is probably the safest place for us.
Who knew?
Speaking of Wonderland, it was only after listening to several doses of the hourly news yesterday that I finally realised I knew one of these names:
I bought it in September 1989 for a couple of quid, and my only comment would (at 88 pages or so) be "It's far too short". There are two (charming) 1969 portraits of Alice by Ovenden.
Although I was...
... gratified to manoeuvre successfully in only two jiggles into a narrow parking slot between two humongous Chelsea tractors in the crowded Waitrose car park — even more so as I'd been slowly following a chap of similarly-advanced maturity who'd failed in his own attempt to drive forward into that slot, and then failed, also, to reverse into it on his second attempt — I still think nobody needs to drive large 4WD vehicles in suburbia.
Right! Time I wasn't here, as I now need to be there. TTFN.
[Pause]
And here I am, back again, wondering how it can be time for an evening meal already. "What clock?" "Ah, such clock!" "Went the day well?" Yes, says he, jumbling two good films together... I have, he added unconnectedly (having noted an incoming email suggestion), no intention of signing up for a PayPal app with which to dine out and "pay at the table". It was bad enough trying to persuade my high-IQ phone to get its act together to act as a half-way decent SatNav device. I refuse to give it any kind of access to my financial life, laughable though that is these days.
Having watched...
... the 'official' trailer for "Gravity", how to follow it except with the re-cut version that turns it into a Rom-Com?