2013 — 25 November: Monday
The barometer is ridiculously high1 as my next day on the planet stirs into somewhat sluggish action. The 8 o'clock news summary on BBC Radio 3 has flowed past without leaving a trace, though I did note, earlier, that Mike Leigh (revealed [to me, at least] in Michael Simkins' lovely 2003 autobiography "What's my Motivation?" to be a fanatical fan of G&S) now wants to revisit "The Pirates of Penzance". Christa and I both enjoyed watching his 1999 film "Topsy Turvy".
A later, skimpier, summary suggests that the UK guvmint will finally take "action" against the outrageously-high interest rates on the sort of pay day loans I first noted some time ago as a nasty feature of life in New Mexico. Also, women in England and Wales will be able to ask the omniscient and incorruptible PC Plod if their would-be boyfriends have violent2 pasts. And what was at one time my bank (the one I now [as a tax payer] own a goodly chunk of) has been up to some unpretty underhand tricks forcing small businesses into insolvency and grabbing their assets on the cheap.
What I didn't hear was any suggestion of capping the wages of bosses in the UK relative to their lowest-paid workers. No, you have to go to Switzerland to find that sort of change. As well as for legal euthanasia. Give it time. It will come. It has to.
Trouble...
... right here in River City. My next-door-but-one neighbour recently ran a Microsoft cleanup suggestion and has somehow broken the associations between Office-type files and the reduced function subset of "Office Starter" installed on her system. Could I find where the executable was now hiding? Don't be silly; this is Microsoft. But my workaround worked. [Pause] I'm off down into Soton to see if there's any money left on my M&S gift card before it expires next February. Even the holes in some of my T-shirts are now developing holes themselves.
Yet another reason for missing Christa, needless to say :-)
Back in the...
... dim, distant, non-post-IBM non-post-Christa part of my Life (OK, 3rd September 2005, to be approximately precise) I bought and read Graham Lord's "unauthorised" biography of John Mortimer. I strongly suspect it was "unauthorised" because Lord — the pesky chap — had managed to ferret out the existence of a previously unacknowledged son Mortimer had produced by actress Wendy "Butterflies" Craig. It strikes me as more than a little ironic that Mortimer tried to censor the book, given his many outstanding bursts of advocacy on behalf of far more scurrilous items.
The administration of the censorship laws entails dividing society into the sensible and the idiotic, the strong and the weaker brethren, and we all know, of course, where we belong. Time and again in obscenity cases Judges and barristers say to Juries, 'Of course, we've all read stuff like this for years and it doesn't affect us (and you can be sure it doesn't or there would be permanent orgies in the Judges' chambers, bondage suits on sale in Chancery Lane and the sound of whips echoing from the Inns of Court), but there are people, members of the Jury, whom you may think would be affected...' The assumption is that there is always a second-class citizen, who, at the glimpse of a doubtful paragraph or dubious magazine, would go uncontrollably mad. The attitude of censorship depends on the assumption that there is a superior type of person qualified to tell the rest of us what it is good for us to read.
Had my trip into town been just for M&S it would have been a grave disappointment, as it turned out I don't have the patience (who would have thought it?) needed to queue up with a horde of Xmas shoppers just to find out what value, if any, remains locked away on my gift card. However, trickling gently along to the nearby Waterstone's I was delighted to unearth a newer biography of Mortimer by Valerie Grove, and also a new book by Jonathan Meades3 bearing about the stupidest blurb I've yet seen from AA Gill on its front cover: "Jonathan Meades is the Jonathan Meades of our generation". Quite so. And add to this a film that was highly recommended to me by Mike a couple of days ago:
It was waiting on my front doorstep, along with a printout (from my Microsoft-challenged neighbour) of a forum posting detailing exactly the same workaround I'd suggested she use, but also clearly indicating that the problem has caught quite a few users of "Office Starter" on the hop, as it were. I have now installed the next batch of four LED bulbs hither and yon, and discovered (yet again) how very very much I dislike the store layout in Ikea, even if their LED bulbs are far cheaper than the ones in B&Q.
Thanks for the coffee and Danish, Len! [Pause] Today's chat — partly regarding talented programmers we'd known — reminded me of an anecdote in Herb Grosch's memoir Computer, bit slices from a life (1991). Grosch tells how, in 1948 or thereabouts: "parties of bright new IBM hires from the Watson Laboratory would come to our place, huddle over my von Bayros prints,4 and ... listen to one of the first modern hi-fi record players in town doing Shostakovich and Benny Goodman."
Later
O me miserum! I stuck with "Stuck" for 25 minutes before seeking something more aligned with my taste, opting for the recently-delivered Blu-ray of Ron Mann's 1988 documentary "Comic Book Confidential". Much more interesting.