2013 — 24 October: Thursday
Coolly dawns the new-born day. (A mere 19.7C here in the living room, despite the sunshine. Brrr.)
I've been pondering some wholesale re-arrangement up in the Books Warehouse, partly to clear the decks for any builders' access needed while constructing some better rain defences. It's the same version (though in miniature) of the logistical tangle I faced during the Great Plumbing Upheaval of 2010 — too many books and not really enough buffer space in the house to manoeuvre.
While I certainly don't intend (or need) to re-hire a room in Mr ReadySteadyStore's splendid Warehouse of Junk a mile away, I think I shall once again be piling some overflow on the poor old dining room table. It's at times like these I could really do with Peter's bedroom1 being somewhat emptier of his 'stuff' so it could then more easily hold more of my 'stuff'...
This is a four bedroom detached house with just me in it, after all. And it sufficed (mostly!) for three people for two decades. Still, as one of the IBM Hursley Lab directors freely admitted, space planning and games of musical chairs/desks consumed far more of his time and attention than he'd expected before he took the job.
Guess when this was written...
... it's by one of the chaps who was to bring us packet switching:
Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems... At present, nothing more than trust — or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication — stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper... Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems.
In 1967. <Sigh> The MIT Tech Review essay containing this quote is well worth reading, too.
Highland clearances
I can't say Christa didn't warn me that, next time...
Christa had no trouble with heights
... this would be my job. I could, it seems, grow moss for England. [Pause] Time to start cleaning myself up for my lunch date. A productive morning, however; I've precisely identified the broken roof tile that is the Prime Suspect in the Case of the Unwanted Water Ingress. And cleaned out a bucketful of moss that was doing its best to soak up water, freeze in the frost, and then shatter the tiles it was so attached to. Now all I need is one of those Checka-Trade chaps to come along and do a spot of replacement work.
I'm glad I plugged the upstairs phone back in as it was thus within audible reach when I was draping myself inelegantly out of the skylight a few minutes ago. So I now have another potential lunch date tomorrow, too. Excellent.
Had I but time...
... enough to read, more carefully, everything that flits across my eyeballs I would have noted the fact that it was Chris Thile (the mandolin bluegrass player I mentioned back in July when he turned his attention to Bach) who introduced Jesca Hoop to a vicious whiskey cocktail. That little factoid was in her newsletter last December, but his name meant nothing to me at that time:
...then in spring I toured around the US East Coast and the Southern states with the über-charmed neo-bluegrass group Punch Brothers. We drank gorgeous whiskeys from every oak barrel in the South! (The 'Penicillin' has made it to #1 as my favourite cocktail thanks to Chris Thile).
I mention this because I've just seen that Chris Thile was one of the performers on yesterday's "Late Junction", which I was simply too tired to listen to at the time, but have just snaffled for later consumption. I'm sure I shall enjoy hearing Partita #1 again.
I was (as ever)...
... looking for something completely different when I found this delightful cartoon in my one-volume compilation of "Night & Day" magazine. This was, for reasons explained below the image, a short-lived British magazine that tried to emulate the "New Yorker" in the 1930s. The fact that the cartoon appeared exactly 14 years before I did tickled me, too:
The cartoonist's name seems to be Harry Hewitt, but when I plugged that into a well-known search engine I got a whole bunch of nasty gossip speculating on the parentage of a current member of the Benighted Kingdom's "royal" family. And when I tried to narrow the search by adding "Night & Day" I then found a hit on Thomas Pynchon's (to me, totally unreadable) fat book Gravity's Rainbow and the annotations2 that have been supplied to it. (Here.)
The "Night & Day" filter had picked up the story about Graham Greene's film review of a Shirley Temple film (Wee Willie Winkie, if anyone cares — I certainly don't) which had so upset Twentieth-Century Fox that they promptly sued the magazine (though it had run out of money and folded before the case was heard) and forced Greene to work in Mexico!