2013 — 2 November: Saturday
A little voice tells me I must make a further effort to get some salad1 so I shall gulp my cuppa and be off. [Pause] And back, in good time for the second half of the first half of Brian Matthew. Domestic God, that's me.
As I near...
... the end of my seventh year of freedom (aka retirement) so things like this...
... remind me of how very little I miss the Wonderful World of Work. This, too:
To be paid considerably more in one year than my lifetime earnings just to limit my use of the company jet? Brilliant!
Meanwhile...
... a seemingly endless supply of rain continues to droppeth on the just and on the unjust fella, alike, if you recall your Ogden Nash. Time for lunch, methinks.
Back when the BBC...
... could boast only one national 405-line VHF monochrome TV channel and three national radio networks I built myself a little crystal radio and a suitable Meccano aerial. The noise the latter made each time it fell over, not to mention the marks produced as it bashed against my bedroom door and walls when it did so, may well have been what helped prompt my parents to give me a GEC 7-transistor portable radio (with safely internal antenna) for my eleventh birthday.
Vitally, this was one transistor more than Big Bro's slightly-earlier "Roberts" radio, so I was content. And I still recall hearing on it a "Light Programme" DJ asserting (on no evidence) that "more popular music songs were written about love than about any other topic".
Fast forward (as it were) half a century. Jonathan Corum (of 13pt) is the information designer who works as the science graphics editor at the New York Times. I adapted one of his nicely-minimal web page templates for my own use here on molehole.org quite some time ago, and keep an eye on his work from time to time. "What", you may well ask, "does that have to do with songs about love?" Here's the answer.
I wish...
... I knew where my Synology NAS goes2 when (from time to time) Win8.1Pro — doubtless, the world's best operating system — loses track of it on my network even though it can still see and 'explore' the network drive folders I've chosen to map as Windows network drives. Yes, I have network discovery on. No, I don't think it should be necessary to reboot the misbegotten operating system, either. But it is.
I also wish it didn't get dark so horribly early at this time of year. Still, I saw a large bumblebee making the most of what it could find on the late batch of tall flowers that have sprung up alongside my two wheelie bins. Life goes on, heh?
Now that I've...
... been using Win8.1Pro for a couple of weeks, and the dust has (more or less) settled, it's prepared to reveal to me my "Most Used" set of "Apps" — not one of which is a "Modern App", of course. Still, at least I know what these eight all are! :-)
Notice anything missing? Firefox is my default web browser, and I use it every day. Yet it didn't manage to make the "Top 8". Or the next 62 ("Moderately used"). It's not even in the final 8 ("Least used"). In fact, Firefox doesn't actually appear anywhere (not even in the 206 Apps that are "Never used") on the fancy new Start screen. It's somehow managed to fly completely under the radar.
Being naturally indolent...
... I do not always read Prefaces3 and Introductions as carefully as I should. Which is ironic, as I know — from the care that goes into them (if my having written more than 20 books is any guide) — how such front matter can only really be written properly after working on the rest of the book has made you so thoroughly sick of it that you simply want to move on. So: what do you suppose links these three items from my overloaded shelves?
Leaving aside ex-PFC Wintergreen's wicked sabotage (by the insertion of "TS Eliot" into one of the phone conversations between General Peckem and General Dreedle in "Catch-22"), I was browsing the Davenport-Hines anthology and noticed (for the first time) his apology for not having been able to get permission from Eliot's estate to quote the vicious pub gossip from lines 139-172 of The Waste Land. That naturally sent me looking for Christa's 1963 copy of the original poem. And that sent me further in search of my copy of Martin Rowson's strange film noir who-dunnit graphic novel version of this difficult poem.
Mind you, I still prefer "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", which I'm pretty sure I first heard used in Alan Bleasdale's magnificent 1991 TV mini-series G.B.H. (which he always insisted stood for "Great British Holiday").