2013 — 1 December: Sunday — rabbits!
Thank goodness that's it for November, this year1 at least. Now, if I could just gently nudge my internal alarm clock setting to wake me a little later in the day... You have to wonder what the evolutionary advantage is of waking before dawn. You can't see to hunt, after all. And there weren't any morning newspapers. Tea hadn't even been invented. Or BBC Radio 3's "Through the Night".
Time for an old favourite?
For more years than I care to remember, I had thought the following quotation came from a NASA report on Technology Transfer in the mid-60s... Heck, on that basis I even put it into a book I wrote for IBM on the history of CICS, though that's another story. (Sample chapter.) I found it again — just over 12 years ago — in Alec Guinness' Commonplace book (page 5, if you're curious), where it was attributed differently, to say the least:
If ever the last 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been about 800 lifetimes. Of these 800 at least 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another — as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of men ever see the printed word. Only during the last four has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of all material goods we use in daily life have been developed within the present 800th lifetime.
I wonder how people hung Xmas decorations in a cave? :-)
I was briefly...
... wondering (as I glanced back over previous diary entries for this date) whether the urban myth about Lyndon Johnson I mentioned (four years ago) was sufficiently ripe yet. It isn't, but there's a snippet at the end of the same piece that bears repeating:
Irreverence is now an industry. The Realist served its purpose, though — to communicate without compromise — and today other voices, in print, on cable TV and especially on the Internet, are following in that same tradition. The last words of my final issue, published in 2001, came from Kurt Vonnegut: "Your planet's immune system is trying to get rid of you."
Who can blame it? [Pause] Though, having scoured my usual web watering holes this morning, I'm not sure about that "communicate without compromise". More tea, vicar?
Interesting
I managed to get within about 16p of the maximum interest from my current account with the Nationwide last month. How sad is that? And if you think that's sad, there's more. I've also noticed that, the less I buy things, the more money I have. This is all new and revolutionary stuff. For me. I think that deserves a late bite of lunch.
Blimey! When did it become 22:40? About a minute ago, I suspect.