2013 — 14 October: Monday
Well, happy b****y birthday to me.1 I actually have the day to myself until the next unexpected thing happens so I've been easing back into what passes for consciousness with Harry Shearer's "Le Show". He's still operating out of London at the moment. Now "Morning Edition" is detailing some of the woes of a partial guvmint shutdown.
Can you imagine? Fox has threatened to stop broadcasting unless a cheeky (and illegal) start-up re-broadcaster stops plopping their ineffable product onto the Interweb thingy as a stream (of what, I wonder) without payment. Personally, I'd say even at that price I wouldn't watch it. But that's just me.
Having devoured...
... not just my breakfast but — and, I agree, some might say "obsessively" over the past couple of months — all the (often quite enjoyable, sometimes quite ludicrous) stuff I could find among the Bits of Ivory here, and the Epilogue Abbey here, I decided it was time for me to "up" the intellectual content of my game a little. Hence today's delivery, very neatly combining two of my current focussed enthusiasms:
It's actually (indirectly) Sarah Emsley's fault. Having very much enjoyed her somewhat scholarly essay here ("Laughing at Our Neighbors: Jane Austen and the Problem of Charity") a week ago I went on a bit of a snoop around the entire archive of essays published by this "Jane Austen Society of North America" outfit in their Persuasions journal. I couldn't afford to pay the outrageous price now being asked for Emsley's own book, but my roving eyes fell upon the title you can see above. Which, at £15-52, fell within the range of my widower's mite.
My dentist...
... is pleased to inform me that I shall soon be able to enjoy the output of an intra-oral video camera. Must I?
Off on a gender bender?
Even after (despite?) hearing her on BBC 6Music a short while ago, I was sure Val McDermid was, erm, a chap. Oops. I've just plonked down another portion of the mite on a complete boxed set of "Wire in the Blood" (a line from TS Eliot that no-one seems able to explain) as Peter and Peter's g/f both assured me that "Once Upon a Time" was (despite the fact that they admitted having watched most of the first three seasons) "complete crap". I need something to watch during those long winter evenings, after all :-)
Meanwhile, I have to...
... say, my next re-reading of "Pride and Prejudice" — once I've finished the plausible (and gripping) account of the autistic spectrum disorders and symptoms of some of its key characters — is going to prove most interesting. I can already feel some of my own prejudices and sympathies shifting around quite alarmingly. It's also fair to say that the vast majority of the fan fiction I've been reading recently is completely blind to this sort of penetrating analysis. A fascinating exercise.
Brrr. It's been too cool and too wet for my taste today. 20.8C in my living room at 18:28 strikes me as a bit unwelcome, though I'm currently using the "wear an extra layer" solution to the problem. But I'm off out for lunch tomorrow, and an evening meal on Wednesday, so "things" are looking up.
Ms Bottomer's book is fascinating. She's a speech language pathologist (no, I haven't a clue, either) of 30 years experience. It's now on my growing Austen shelf. Right, what's next? A cuppa, methinks, and a change of entertainment medium.
I had...
... completely forgotten that Randy Newman's "Gone dead train" (which I have on the "Odds and Ends" CD within the 4-CD boxed set "Guilty", and have just heard on Gideon Coe's evening show) is from the soundtrack to Nic Roeg's 1970 film Performance. I recognised the singer, of course, but had to resort to the BBC website to find what was "Now playing" before I could confirm this wasn't a track I'd managed to miss from my little collection. Phew!