2013 — 7 December: Saturday
There really is nothing quite like a gentle burst of Bach1 from the BBC to be enjoyed with the first post-return-of-consciousness cuppa.
Fry's verbal delight
Animated language about language? Nice. And if you listen right to the end, you can even hear his pet peeve. (Link.)
Hark!
I'm still a little taken aback (in a good way) at just how silent the house has become without the second of my two kitchen freezers doing its heatpumpy thing. Right now, the only sounds I can hear suggest that BlackBeast was doing some defragging (or, perhaps, indexing) and that the paper boy needs to oil his bike or check his brakes. If I want to hear the clock ticking I have to get up and move to the other end of the living room.
As I mentioned to Iris yesterday (she's about to have some central heating work done) I've had to learn and become used to a whole new set of "house noises" since the summer of 2010. I no longer have any hot or cold water tanks or stored water. It used to be that, after drawing2 a bath, I could enjoy a symphony of gurgles as water rushed through pipes to re-fill both tanks for the next few minutes. Now, I turn off the hot tap to the bath and... instant silence.
And some...
... people call me obsessive. Pah! (Link #1 and Link #2.)
I shudder...
... when contemplating the potential damage our lovely mayor of London can do.
What all this means, contrary to [Boris] Johnson's banal non-observations, is that children with IQs of more than 130 can be very vulnerable. The selective private sector education system that blessed us with Johnson and his colleagues, and also the grammar school system he lauds, are not the infallible machines for attracting the finest minds he thinks they are.
Mind you, I shudder when looking back at my own schooling, which is why Christa and I did what we could to assist Peter's education. As I wrote to dear Mama back in 1995:
2 April: Item #1 concerns your only grandson, whom I very much hope you'll be pleased to hear has been selected as one (of just two) "exceptionally gifted" children to attend a fully-funded weekend of intensive exercises in Wiltshire this May. As far as we can make out, Hampshire County Council is picking up the bill, so whether he will end up in some central Government data-bank is anybody's guess!
7 May: Sadly, Peter's "gifted" weekend in Wiltshire has been cancelled. We haven't yet heard exactly why, but it seems to have been insufficient interest (on the part, I presume, of other parents). Still, he's got the first of his four "A" level maths module exams in about three weeks to keep him busy. (His class mates, of course, don't even take their "O" level maths for another year.) And he's seen off Jane Austen!
Well...
... I never knew the original score for Kubrick's "2001" was composed by Alex North and was apparently discarded late in the day. Still, North managed to recycle some of it into a 1981 Disney film called "Dragonslayer". Which I was equally unaware of until listening to BBC Radio 3 this afternoon.