2013 — 10 December: Tuesday
I'm clearly a twisted person. Why else would I find amusing the report that MPs have criticised the outdated IT systems of the Border Force? Poor Theresa May. Or the report that we won't even know — for longer than the remainder of the life of this stinky guvmint1 — how much the written-off IT systems supposed to handle the merging of six benefit payments is going to cost? Poor Iain Duncan Smith.
It's almost enough to shake my faith in the probity and competence of the Great and the Good to whom we foolishly entrust these things on the basis of the spin put on their promises by a biased media each time the ballot boxes trundle around. They call it suffage, but it feels more like 'sufferage' or (since that word doesn't exist) 'suffer rage'.
I'd put in a vote for Kludgeocracy. Source and snippet:
A "kludge" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose... a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem." The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.
Don't blame me. It just seemed appropriate for a "Patch Tuesday".
Library Thing
I've just revisited their Zeitgeist pages. Here's the current top 60 (books and authors):
(Small confession: I had to capture 60 titles [rather than 50] this time to keep six of my favourite books visible. You can click the pic to see the changes wrought by the past five years.)
I tried...
... I really, really tried. But Xmas shopping has always struck me as pretty futile. And this year — with the shops seeming to be more full of rubbish than ever before — I've just got back, essentially empty-handed, but (thank goodness) in time to make myself a very late 'lemonses' cuppa. I shall simply have to try being very nice and polite to people instead. Or pleading abject poverty. Tricky one, that.
Funny, when viewed...
... in the right light. I note from dear Mama's bank statement today that she's now burned through more care-home fees since August 2010 than I've received from the IBM pension fund since January 2007. She remains as unaware of this as she is of, well, erm, anything, although she would throw a major hissy fit if she knew. (Hence my [mild] amusement.)
I remain equally unaware of what she made of my news to her in my weekly letter 18 years ago :-)
Very nice to see you yesterday, and thank you very much indeed for the delicious lunch and all that birthday/Christmas cash. Needless to say, it always comes in handy at about this time of year! We didn't make very good time on the return; there was quite heavy traffic. We got back at about 6:30, well after it had become both pitch dark and (sub) freezing cold, but still in time to get Peter over to a 16th birthday party for one of his classmates. He was so happy to have been asked, and we collected him at about 11:30, just a tad tipsy but still very lively. So it was quite a long day for us!
Always nice...
... to get a visit. In this case, from Mike, dropping off three films I don't know anything of and his Xmas card. He caught me dispelling the mid-afternoon grey gloom of a typical December indulging in an episode of "The Blacklist". Still, all current domestic tasks — or, at least, all the ones I feel like tackling — are loosely under control. Besides, I have a date with Dr Fang tomorrow. In the words of Max Bialystock, "I need a treat." Bite me.
I was going...
... to mention today's other three acquisitions earlier. I suppose a case could now be made for me having quite enough treats for one day:
However, I first found myself embroiled in software updates to both my (indispensable) Copernic desktop search tool, and my (indispensable) Xara 64-bit graphics tool. Let's hope their stability isn't wobbulated too much by the yet-to-come Win 8.1 patches. See above re "Kludgeocracy". Anyhowsover, back in April 2004 (had you been following me around Soton) you'd have seen me buy my copy of Harry Frankfurt's book "On Bullshit" — in their review, the WSJ wouldn't actually print the title. The Aaron James title is a worthy addition to the canon, I suspect. Christopher Matthew does a nice line in parodic verse. And Faramerz Dabhoiwala? Never 'eard of 'im!