2013 — 27 December: Friday
As I browsed my latest online statement1 I couldn't help but replay (mentally, at least) parts of yesterday evening's quite interesting look at "ageing computer systems" (heavens, even CICS got a mention) on BBC Radio 4. Not that I exactly overflow with warm feelings towards banks in general — never have, never will — but I do feel a certain sympathy for the staff in their IT departments.
I mentioned...
... the 'uncommercial' atmosphere of Meisenheim at Xmas in years gone ("gone"? more like "whizzed"!) by yesterday. In fact, it was while staying there for our first-ever Xmas as a couple in 1974 that we found out both the local banks took the same day off once a year from handling alien things like Barclaycards and Midland Bank Eurocheques while they totted up (I assume by abacus) their year-end foreign currency transactions for the year. Only the fact that Christa had long been known to the staff (factory-owner's daughter [grin]) enabled me to extract some necessary2 marks from them.
Am I yet...
... old enough to consider tackling Proust? The essay here suggests I could be. Source and snippet:
Few writers have cut through themselves, their assumptions, their romances, so unsentimentally as the intermittently reclusive Frenchman, who notes in the same book that "We ought at least, for prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own."
Quite so. I'm not proud of my ignorance. But then I only realised the genius of Austen within the last decade.
This made me smile:
Thought for the day is an important part of my daily exercise routine. Whenever it is announced I have to leap up and switch the radio off until it is over. I do find that I can easily start my day without listening to irrational claptrap.
It's one (of many) comments to the Grauniad piece here. Personally, I seem to encounter irrational claptrap in all sorts of places. Including my own head, but let's not go there.
But what about...
... Asimov's Laws of Robotics?
We know for sure that future armies will be a combination of waves of robot soldiers overrunning enemy positions supported by drone air support. The first country to develop a robot army (likely the U.S.) will dominate every non-nuclear country. No human army or uprising could last a day against waves of robot fighters going door-to-door through a city or mountain range. So traditional wars will simply stop happening because the U.S. will rent its robot army to whichever side it supports and almost any war will end in days.
Call it my...
... zany sense of humour, but it strikes me as quirky that the only comment so far made about this retraction majors on the rules of Scrabble. Source and snippet:
...written by Gamal Yousef and Ahmed E. Lasheen, both of Zagazig University (which, we're guessing, would hold the record for institution of higher learning with the most possible points in Scrabble — with a triple word tile that's at least 131 points, including the seven-letter bonus!).
Having enjoyed...
... so much the exquisite comedic pairing of Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan in "Episodes" last weekend, I thought it worth risking £13 on this further batch of DVDs:
I've been warned it's rather surreal.
Not much danger...
... of this happening to me :-)
It turns out that Roger has a manga version, in French, of the entire Proustian saga, all compressed into about 250 pages or so. I don't think I'll be starting with that!