2013 — 13 October: Sunday

With son and heir still underfoot¹ I'm not sure quite what the game plan is for today. Just avoiding the drizzle would be acceptable, probably.

I found much...

... of what the sainted Mrs Thatcher chose to do pretty abhorrent. I therefore find much to agree with in this well-argued piece. Source and tiny snippet:

The legacy from privatisation that has always been the problem was the second, later wave of sell-offs that put monopoly suppliers of water, gas and electricity into private hands. The structure and regulation of the utilities has never been got right by governments of either stripe. Rather than create proper competition, they have the smell about them of a cosy cartel dedicated to maximising the returns to their shareholders and swelling the bank accounts of their boards rather than innovating on behalf of the consumer.

Andrew Rawnsley in Observer

Last time I...

... encountered Mimosa it was the name on the room I occupied in the "Lugger Inn" (now upgraded to hotel, I see) in Portloe, Cornwall, on one of my last family holidays² with my parents, in the late 1960s. Mimosa now has a wholly different meaning, as my son has pointed out. My use of modern web technologies is non-existent, but then my need for them at my simplified time of life is almost equally non-existent. And (he admits) the learning curve is fairly steep.

What am I to make of stuff like this? I'm blissfully unaware of the problem of front-end package management, and did not even know build stacks could hold opinions :-)

Later

Lunch lunched and laundry laundered I'm free to contemplate the rain, the ineffable whichness of the why, and my last day as a 61-year-old. Well, at least lunch was nice. In other news, and because I'd not been keeping my finger on the pulse, I was mildly surprised to discover a sixth season of the Museum of Curiosity is currently on the air, so I snaffled the first two episodes to see if the standard has been maintained.³

I must also try to remember to grab the next chunk of Waugh's "Sword of Honour". As I said a while back, I haven't re-read that since Christa and I "enjoyed" a simultaneous attack of double pneumonia over 22 years ago. I still remember laughing out loud at the incident of Apthorpe's "Thunder-box", but I was very feverish (104 F) at the time.

I wonder if...

... the upgrade of Dropbox to 2.4.2 is what's prompted it to offer to integrate its services with the Win8 desktop "Snipping Tool". I was using that to capture a portion of an image from a web site to attach it to an email to my chum Val in Stockholm and, for the first time, Dropbox popped up with an offer to upload the capture to my Cloud-based folder. I know my high-IQ Android smartphone already does this, but until now, Win8 has been a bit of a laggard.

I mis-typed earlier, when I said I'd not encountered "Mimosa" since that Cornwall holiday. I should have said "first time" rather than "last time". As I often find, when taking the Copernic desktop search tool out for a little snoop round some of my archives, I discovered the topic had come up during an email exchange I'd had with my friend Carol a mere decade ago:

Subject: Tag sales
I can't imagine what these are (though I can remember a spoof National Lampoon cover that showed a mattress tag that was illegal to remove), but I assume you're up in Maine today helping out with one. I find only "lobster" mapped mentally onto Maine in what passes, these days, for my brain.
And, come to think of it, I don't even like lobster, having tried one in Portloe (Cornwall) on a summer holiday with my parents. I stayed, if you can believe it, in a room called "Mimosa" at a small, but reputedly nowadays gourmet, former smugglers' inn in a tiny fishing bay approached on a seemingly vertical single track road that looped down through and back up and out. In escaping from the parental clutches for one day I even walked the eight miles from Portloe to Mevagissey in the (delightful) company of an elderly American bird-watching couple along an excellent coastal route.

Date: 21 June 2003

Oh, good grief. Shoot me now. There's also an occurrence in the "Wallet of Kai Lung" early in the story "The Transmutation of Ling":

Here Lin Yi called out some words in the Miaotze tongue, whereupon
a follower appeared, and opened a gate in the stockade of prickly
mimosa which guarded the mouth of the den.

And a song by Kirsty MacColl (on the 1989 album "Kite") titled La Foret de Mimosas.

Footnotes

¹  I mean that in the nicest possible way, even though they have moved a dozen or so storage cartons of books back into "his" room for the duration (of what, I wonder?) :-)
²  Oddly, I recall it more for the fact that I walked with an American couple the eight miles or so to Mevagissey, and I also discovered the thrillers of Gavin Lyall (the late Mr Katherine Whitehorn) on the local store's revolving wire rack while dear Mama was happier with her pot-boiling "Peyton Place". De gustibus non est disputandum. (Though I thought it a little odd that she disapproved of my request to read it.) I ended up buying my own copy in June 2005 when it was re-issued — now under the category "Virago Modern Classic". I noted its authoress had by then long since died of cirrhosis of the liver.
³  It has, I'm very pleased to note.