2013 — 5 November: Tuesday
What care I if (indeed) "most places will be dull and wet this morning"? It isn't as if I can do owt 'bout the weather, after all. And, besides, my habit of steadily eating will drive me out of the house sooner or later. I'm currently predicting sooner.1 My perceived need for tea has always tended to exceed that for food.
Not that I'm an addict.
It's five years...
... ago, to the day, since Christa won her last-ever prize from Uncle ERNIE. (Bonds remain in the prize draw, by default, for up to 12 months after the death of the holder.) I've just checked my own results and find I've been promised two of his smallest prizes (total: £50) all to myself this month.
Back in 2008 the smallest prize was £50. Of course, since then, the fetid practice of "quantitative easing" (aka printing money) with billions of pounds poured (cyberspatially by the Bank of England) into what "they" laughingly like to imagine2 is an economic system "they" have any meaningful control over has also wreaked havoc on monetary values.
One can only smile, therefore, at the news that the eldest son of Phil the Greek still pays no Corporation Tax on the revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall. Why is that, I wonder? Perhaps it's to allow him to pay for his toothpaste tube squeezer.
Time, energy...
... and (frankly) interest has yet to enable me to finish either of the two books I've so far tried by Robert Twigger. I did, however, read all of this article and was rewarded in the final paragraph:
Boredom has long been one of my greatest fears. [Pause] Living long enough to endure the sort of society resulting from the witless idiot currently "in charge" of national education policy would be another. There's a comment attached to a Polly Toynbee piece that struck a chord:
Why are politicians so unsophisticated? Maths or art, engineering or literature, french or latin, economics or music — humans are blessed with brains that are big enough for both and
the whole is immeasurably greater than the sum of the parts.
I am complete geek, maths and science to tertiary and beyond. If I hadn't had the opportunity to study literature at school I would not only be far less fulfilled in myself, I would be less
able to communicate through scientific writing and I suspect I would be even more intolerably boring.
Why is it...
... that little white-haired ladies, driving little white-painted cars, are exempt from the need to stop (or, at least, slow down) when they reach the white-painted dotted lines across the end of the exit lanes in the Waitrose car park?
Ripples from my hippie past
I'm always pleased to hear the music of The Doors, but I could hardly believe my ears when Radcliffe and Maconie played "Love Street" from the 1968 album Waiting for the sun a few minutes ago. I noticed — for the first time — just how rotten the tinkling piano playing is right at the end. "But that's not the way I remember it" thinks I. And, sure enough, having now just played the same track from my MP3 that I'd ripped from my CD, I'm left wondering where on earth the BBC got hold of the version they played.
Mine fades to black (as it were) before the amateurishness of the final piano notes can be heard. Wikipedia suggests the original track is a whole two seconds longer than mine! To add to the confusion, the info printed on my CD gives a running time of 3m 6s while the track lists on the CD player as 2m 50s. I'm feeling slightly short-changed.
Somewhat to my...
... surprise — and I admit I haven't bothered to test it yet3 — the lying toad piece of software called Device Mangler (or something like that) is currently asserting that my supplementary graphics card and the motherboard's onboard graphics (previously feared toasted during the "upgrade" to Win8.1 Pro) are now both happy bunnies with all drivers correctly loaded.4 Once again, I find myself wondering in what sense this is a Finite State Machine, as opposed to that Infinite Improbability Device envisioned by Douglas Adams 35 years ago.
Since I have a good book to hand, or on Tablet (more accurately), and "Scheherazade" turned up nice and (very) loud to drown out all but the most insistent fireworks, what need have I of moving pixels on the 60" Kuro plasma screen for my entertainment?