2013 — 17 December: Tuesday
There's a delicious, multi-harp ("4 Girls 4 Harps") piece playing as my tea brews this morning. Finnish?1 Better than the piteously-attenuated dawn chorus that is all one gets to hear hereabouts these days.
I was (mildly)...
... amused, on looking back to this day in 2006, to note my as-yet still unfulfilled prediction that, one day, I might even watch Reservoir Dogs. It must have been with that thought in mind that I actually went on to buy a DVD of it in the (now sadly defunct) Fopp a mere two weeks later.
I was (mildly)...
... unamused to hear suggestions that some of our Lords and Ladies are "clocking in" to their workplace for just a few minutes each day before scarpering, clutching their £300 expenses.
While I also learn that today's 40- and 50-year-olds will be substantially poorer in retirement than my own generation "unless they inherit". In a report of often almost stunning banality from the Institute of Fiscal Studies one can read such gems as:
Many more people in younger cohorts expect to inherit wealth; but expected inheritances are distributed unequally and are higher for those who are already wealthier...
Under current policy, state pension entitlements for individuals born in the 1960s and 1970s will tend to replace a smaller proportion of prior earnings than is the case for those currently
above, or around, the state pension age...
It could reasonably be thought of not as a reduction in the generosity of state pensions, but as a measure to stop the rise in generosity that would otherwise have occurred alongside higher
life expectancies...
Meanwhile, down under...
... Big Bro tells me that "Rachel" (niece #2, the helicopter pilot) "and family have just acquired a 23 acre lot and are now set to build their mansion!!!"
But, obviously, can only afford child labour. And there was me thinking that NZ was socially more advanced than the UK.
Since one of...
... my dining companions the other day was a psychiatrist, I (inevitably) took the opportunity of describing that wonderful XKCD "Purity of fields" cartoon to him:
But inserting "Psychiatrists" in the obvious position. On checking more recent strips, I've just found this neat one:
His pop-up title text reads: "Conveniently approximated as e+2, Pau is commonly known as the Devil's Ratio (because in the octal expansion, "666" appears four times in the first 200 digits while no other run of 3+ digits appears more than once)".
One welcome...
... result of yesterday's fruitless delving in various kitchen-based nooks and crannies for the leather-belt-hole-bodger gadget was the (re)-discovery of the instructions for my Bosch fridge-freezer. As I've now powered down both my Zanussi chest freezers it has become slightly more important to understand the inner workings of the Bosch. Turns out its fridge bit defrosts automatically all by itself whereas the freezer compartment (which has its own door, after all) is treated, as it were, as a separate manual-intervention case. Good to know. I'm still finding the often-complete silence from the kitchen faintly eerie, but in a good way.
Perhaps I could get today's delivery to breathe on it from time to time?
Some of the music for this 1981 film was recycled by Alex North from material that had been spurned by Kubrick for "2001".
You know...
... you're a year older when you realise you're sending another annual request to dear Mama's carehome for their next schedule of fee payments. It's quite hard to believe she's been "living" there for about three and a half years already. Still, there's no way I could manage to look after her...
Two months of life with Windows 8.1 — my, how Time flies! [Pause] The dragon is safely slain :-)